“Aim at a gold gown and you’ll get a sleeve,” says our grandmother’s proverb; so our wise woman knows what is best and aims for it, but contents herself with what she can get. For an American house, the best flooring, generally speaking, would be—for a vestibule—tiles of small pattern and modest color, such as yellow and brown, which would take no injury from muddy overshoes or dripping umbrellas; for the rest of the house hard wood floors (Southern pine is admirable), plain or very simply inlaid. Elaborate patterns in inlaid woods should be avoided, except in large rooms, and contrasts of colors, such as stripes of black walnut and hard pine, which make a narrow hallway look yet narrower; but a modest border might be inlaid around any room, hall, parlor, or bedroom with good effect, if desired, with a substantial oriental rug in the midst of it all. There can be nothing better than this. But a cheap pine floor, if properly laid, can be stained and made to do good service, instead of hard wood, and a strip of cocoanut matting running the length of the hall is not to be despised; or, if cracks yawn too perceptibly to have the floor bare, it can be covered with a plain, self-colored drugget or carpet filling, or “two ply,” while a strip of bright carpet passes from the doorway up the stairs, and enlivens the hall. Or, simpler yet, the floor can be painted a serviceable yellow or gray, and a width of rag carpet can add warmth and color. There are pretty straw mattings in greens and reds and cream colors which, with the aid of rugs, serve admirably for floor coverings, but they are hardly durable enough for entry ways. Our wise woman bears in mind that a well-laid, hard wood floor will outlast many a drugget, or carpet, or coat of paint, or oil cloth, and she does up her hall floor, at first, in as durable a fashion as her purse will allow. There is a certain fitness of things also to be observed. Good taste forbids her to step from an entry with stained or painted pine floor and rag carpet to a parlor with inlaid floors and Persian rugs. The rag carpet of the hall demands something correspondingly simple in the reception room; a floor stained or painted in the same fashion, or a straw matting, with perhaps a few breadths of “Morris” carpet, of warm color and quiet figure, sewed together to make a rug, and raveled at the ends for fringe. As for walls, it is convenient to divide them with a chair rail or moulding of the same stuff as that used for mop-boards and door casings, fastened about four feet from the floor and running around the entry and up the side wall of the stairway. The wall below this moulding can be painted in oil a warm olive-brown or green, or a dull red, and, when so painted, can be washed like the woodwork.