When the side of a room is broken by recesses, projections, &c., a good workman will so arrange his pieces of paper as to give a symmetrical appearance to the two sides of a projection of a recess, so that the same part of the pattern which comes to the right hand edge shall also be seen at the left hand. In papering a staircase, when the upper and lower edges are oblique and not horizontal, it is of course necessary that the ends of the paper should be cut in a corresponding manner, in order that the long joints should be vertical. As it is difficult to bring the ends of the paper precisely to the cornice at the top and to the skirting-board at the bottom, it is usual to hide those ends by pasting a narrow strip of paper along the top and bottom of a room, which gives a neat finish to them. This strip of paper is printed in colours with some pleasing device; and as a broad piece is printed as quickly as one two or three inches wide, it is customary to carve a block with twelve or twenty repetitions of the same narrow pattern, side by side; so that the whole are printed on one sheet. The paper-hanger has therefore carefully to cut the strips one from another, and paste them round the wall at the parts which we have mentioned, and sometimes up the corners of the room likewise. It is sometimes preferred, instead of papering the walls of a room, to _stencil_ them. In this case the plaster of the wall is prepared in a smooth manner to receive the distemper colour, and the pattern is stamped or printed on the wall in a manner almost exactly the same as that which we have described respecting stencilling paper-hangings. This mode is not susceptible of so much neatness as the use of printed or stamped paper, and is only employed for common apartments. There is occasionally a kind of work which falls into the hands of the paper-hanger very different from those we have mentioned--viz., fixing gilt wood mouldings round the top and bottom of a room, instead of pasting a paper bordering in the same place. What little we shall have to say on this subject will be contained in the following chapter. CHAPTER X. THE INTERIOR--PAINTING AND GILDING. Reasons for Painting a House.