Our kitchens are perhaps the most really beautiful spots in our homes, if we take true beauty to consist of absolute fitness for the work to be done therein. The severe wooden dresser, with its wide undershelf and commodious cupboards, is as picturesque an object as can be found. From time immemorial its shape has been unaltered, and its beauty consists in its suggestions of utility. Traditional work is mostly beautiful, as evidenced by the fact that the lines of a plough have always been the admiration of artists. Plainness is not ugliness, and the dresser, glorified, is now one of the necessary beauty spots even in our drawing-rooms. Then those Windsor chairs, with their slightly sloping backs and hollowed seats, are restful to both eye and body. The bright steel or copper range fitted with necessary knobs and useful doors is another example of the beauty of fitness. In fact, both stove and dresser are forms of truth and realism. The two great faults to be avoided in the dining-room of our House Beautiful are dreariness and overcrowding. The French _salle-à-manger_ is really an ideal to work towards. Unfortunately, few of us can consecrate the parlour to meals alone; this living-room has to serve many purposes. We should have it as spacious, thou, and airy as possible. Round tables have gone out of fashion, unfortunately; yet the claw-leg pedestal table is the most convenient, and consequently the most decorative, of its kind. It economises space, and is easily beautified. I have in memory a dining-room I should like to see reproduced in many a home. Just an ordinary square chamber, with two straight windows looking out on a lawn; a round table, its centre encircled with flowers; a plain sideboard, guiltless of plate-glass, but enlivened by old silver wine coolers, napkin rings, and goblets; a wide brass-bound fireplace with hobs; a high mantelpiece, surrounded with a brazen grating; a screen, and a few fine chairs. The beauty of it--and it was very beautiful--consisted in fitness for the end for which it was designed. The walls were covered with a light-tinted background for pictures (not with ornamental garden stuff in perspective). Its heavy, rich curtains hung by visible rings from a real pole; its coal-scoop was of copper, not papier-maché tinware; its cupboards full of glass that might be wanted, and silver often called for; its napery and napkins fine and fair; its thick carpet guiltless of grating greens and crude crimsons; its windows made to open, and its iron-flanged door made to shut. There was no meaningless or characterless ornamental work about this old room; no inappropriate decoration spoiled its well-designed and well-constructed _tout ensemble_.