As no straw-work of this sort is being made in Europe to-day, one can but venture to guess at the details of the process. Such old volumes as Barrow’s “Dictionarium Polygraphicum,” and the “Handmaid of the Arts,” in which one might reasonably look for some hint on the subject, are strangely neglectful of the matter, which leads to the conclusion that though straw marqueterie was at one time one of the flourishing small arts on the Continent, it was less generally known in England. In fact, nearly all the English work of the sort dates from the eighteenth century. In the Victoria and Albert Museum is an ingeniously constructed work-box of pine, decorated on the outside and the inside with colored straw-work arranged in panels containing checkers, diagonal lines, and other devices. The front is fitted with a revolving shutter, behind which is a panel ornamented in the center with buildings and fitted below with a small drawer. Below the shutter is a larger drawer, divided into four lidded compartments, two of the lids being of glass; under this drawer is another small drawer. At the top of the box is a lid fitted inside with a mirror and covering two compartments with hinged lids. The word “HOPE” appears on both the front and the back of the box. There are four turned bone handles and a lozenge-shaped lock-plate of the same material. In the author’s collection is a cabinet of straw marqueterie, measuring 8½ inches in height, 9 inches in breadth, and 4¾ inches in depth. There is one wide, deep drawer at the bottom, above which six narrower, shallower drawers are placed in two sections of three each. From the shape of the handles, the proportion of the cabinet, the quality of the black lacquer inside finish of the drawers, and the design of the panel across the bottom, one is led to conclude that this is an uncommon example of Japanese workmanship. A number of small boxes with figure subjects, all carefully and wonderfully worked out in filaments of colored straw, are extant to attest to the durability of straw marqueterie, which is not nearly so fragile as its name suggests it to be. Some of these were executed by French prisoners of war as Norman Cross in 1810.