I do not think it proper to display a strange clergyman's cast-off costume in my little home any more than I would expect the canon of a cathedral to let me hang up a pair of my old overalls in his cathedral. Nor--if I must confess it--have I felt myself greatly drawn to the suggestion that we should have a lot of tall hand-painted candles sitting or standing round in odd spots. I mean those candlesticks which are painted in faded colors, with touches of dull gilt here and there on them and which are called after a lady named Polly Crome--their original inventor, I suppose she was, though her name does sound more as if Arnold Bennett had written her than as if she were a native Italian. I imagine she thought up this idea of a hand-painted candlestick nine feet tall and eighteen inches through at the base, and then in her honor the design was called after her, which in my humble opinion was compounding one mistake on top of another. Likewise I fear that I shall never become entirely reconciled to these old-model Italian chairs. My notion of a chair is something on which a body can sit for as long as half an hour without anesthetics. In most other details concerning antique furniture they have made a true believer out of me, but as regards chairs I am still some distance from being thoroughly converted. In chairs I favor a chair that is willing to meet you halfway, as it were, in an effort to be mutually comfortable. The other kind--the kind with a hard flat wooden seat and short legs and a stiff high back, a chair which looks as though originally it had been designed to be used by a clown dog in a trained animal act--may be artistic and beautiful in the chasteness of its lines and all this and that; but as for me, I say give me the kind of chair that has fewer admirers and more friends in the fireside circle. I take it that the early Italians were not a sedentary race. They could not have figured on staying long in one place. I suppose the trouble with me is that I was born and brought up on the American plan and have never entirely got over it. In fact I was told as much, though not perhaps in exactly those words, when antiques first became a vital issue in our domestic life. In no uncertain terms I was informed that everybody who is anybody goes in for the Italian these times. I believe the only conspicuous exceptions to the rule are the Italians who have emigrated to these shores. They, it would appear, are amply satisfied with American fixtures and fittings. I have a suspicion that possibly some of them in coming hither may have been actuated by a desire to get as far away as possible from those medieval effects in plumbing which seem to be inseparable from Old World architecture.