How to light the dining room is a question of some importance. There should be light enough to show the table to advantage, but it should be possible to darken the room with shutters or blinds in the inevitable summer warfare with flies. A room looks better, artistically, where the light enters from but one side. Cross lights are the artist’s abhorrence. In city houses a conservatory built out on one side gives a pleasant suggestion of the woods and out-of-doors, and at the same time gives the right effect of light and shade to the room. Kerosene lamps are not ornaments to the dining or tea table. They are cumbersome, malodorous, and their room is better than their company. A chandelier over the table, burning gas or holding lamps, is the easiest and cheapest arrangement, but not the most picturesque. The prettiest light of all, and probably the most expensive, as the prettiest things are apt to be, is given by wax candles from tall candlesticks. Four of these judiciously arranged on the table will give an abundance of light for those seated about it, if additional light be provided for the rest of the room by a lamp on the sideboard or in side sconces. A dining room should not be too warm. It is an old boarding house trick to so heat the dining room as to take away all appetite for food. The room should, in fact, be kept a little cooler than the rest of the house, partly because the lower temperature provokes appetite, and in part because on leaving the table it is natural to feel a sensation of chilliness, the blood of the body being called aside to the business of digestion, so that it is comfortable after eating to step into a room a few degrees warmer than that in which one has been seated. The color of the dining room depends upon its size, exposure, and upon whether it must do double duty as sitting room, or library. Dark, rich furniture and wall-hangings have been the rule for dining rooms for many a year. The larger the room, the more elaborate, rich and dark can be the furnishing, but a dark room that hardly gets a glimpse of sun throughout the year must be made sunny by plenty of yellow in woodwork, or walls; bright, sunny pictures with gilt frames; and by the glitter of brass or of the pretty, yellow English ware with which the china shops are aglow this year. For rich wall effects Japanese or leather paper is good, Lincrusta better, the latter being a comparatively new material, in substance something like linoleum, washable and very durable (so the manufacturers assert), having figures raised upon it, and coming in good designs and colors. With elaborately decorated walls, plain curtains are called for. Where the walls are to be furnished freely with oil paintings, let the pictures supply the decoration, and let the walls be as unobtrusive as possible—only ensuring that they are of a good back ground color; sage, olive-green, olive-brown, or dull red, in paint or paper.