holes in the floor were not inviting to have around. But the furnace, whether hot air or steam, did warm the house. Thermometers stood at from seventy to eighty instead of being kept where they belonged, down in the sixties, and throat and lung diseases multiplied. Then some one who had not forgotten the cheer of the fireplace introduced the hot air from a chimney register, giving out heat, with no sign of fire, from the old spot, and then came the make-believe iron logs with an internal gas arrangement which was lighted when guests came, and burned in a pathetic, appealing way, provoking the beholder now to laughter and now to tears. It was left to the æsthetic craze to bring in the last and worst affront of all to comfort and common sense, a fireplace with highly glazed tiles and elaborate wrought iron back, with choice and costly fenders, tongs, and andirons of brass and steel, with all the appointments of the fireplace of the most luxurious stamp, but all too fine for possible use, with absolutely nothing intended for use. The poor, foolish, iron logs never deceived any one, but they burned; nevertheless, these beautifully tiled fireplaces, with their spick and span hearths are mere husks, and are as loathsome and cluttersome as are the “air castles” and wax fruit, which these æsthetics would banish in contempt from their homes. The height of luxury is to have the sharpness of winter’s cold subdued by a good furnace in the cellar, which modifies the air all over the house, and then to have open fires here and there to give cheer as well as additional warmth and good ventilation, and a fireplace finished with plain brick, without a tile, the brick work, freshened up occasionally by painting it with Indian red mixed with milk, after the fashion of fifty years ago, or a plain iron grate for coal, used as occasion calls, is in better taste for a drawing room than the most elaborate combination of tiles, brass and steel kept for mere show. When any object, not alone a fireplace, but any object designed primarily for use is so excessively ornamented as to fail of its mission of utility, this very excess of decoration becomes an offense and renders the object neither useful nor beautiful. Wm. Morris’s stringent rule, “Have nothing in your homes that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful,” applies with full force to the drawing room; and when the housekeeper has striven first of all to supply her drawing room with comfortable, useful pieces of furniture, she may look around her with surprise to find that almost without her thought the place has grown beautiful as well. [A] POWDER—a technical term used in heraldry—a figure is powdered on a coat of arms, when it is repeated at uniform intervals over its surface. A PRAYER BY THE SEA. BY SARAH DOUDNEY. I saw the ships on a windy sea In the light of the morning’s gold; And the shout of the sailors came to me Like songs from the days of old.