parlor is the better place), and the best pictures the house affords, always making sure that they are good pictures. Better always a good photograph, or wood-cut, or etching, than a poor chromo, steel engraving, or water-color; and better, a hundred fold, a good water-color than a poor oil painting. If your family portraits are poor, consign them to the garret or the upstairs hall, but, if possible, have at least one good painting in your home-room, even if it does cost money; and remember that a first-hand sketch by a good living artist is better than a second-hand copy of an old master. But one good painting in a house, whether a copy or an original, is a continual art lesson. A woman of taste will not mix all manner of pictures together on one wall. If possible, she will keep oil paintings by themselves, and not put them in juxtaposition with water-colors—nor will she put a picture suited only to a gallery in a family sitting room. Nor will she put Bacchantes in the same group with worshiping cherubs. There is a vast deal of stuff purely ephemeral that women are apt to load their walls with—Christmas, New Year, Easter and birthday cards, and painted panels, which may do very well to exhibit during the holidays or the day or two after the birthday; then, having had their day, they should cease to obtrude if not to be. There should be a box or receptacle for all this clutter; such souvenirs are admirable for their suggestions to the amateur decorator or embroiderer of the family, but they should not be allowed to spot the walls, to hang from the side brackets or to decorate the looking-glass. “God bless our home” is a devout aspiration which is better carried out in a godly life than worked in cross-stitch and hung over the sitting room door. I have seen Scripture texts deftly inwrought into the mural decoration of a sea-side cottage, verses from the sailors’ Psalm being painted in a decorative way between border lines of frieze or dado, where they did not seem out of place, but the summer boarders were well nigh driven from another cottage because of a card-board abomination hung over the mantel piece of their sitting room, with indigo clouds and grass-green waves, with a three-quarters-length Christ in all colors of the rainbow uttering the magic words worked in shaded reds—“Peace, Be Still.” The matter of mottoes has been overdone, and it is always safe to leave them out altogether.