it. It must, in fact, be a visible mould of invisible matter, like the leaf-mould one finds in mineral springs, which show the wonderful veining, branching, construction and delicacy of outline in a way which one could hardly be conscious of in the actual leaf.

If the grade or dignity of the home requires professional and scholarly art direction, the problem is how to use this professional or artistic advice without delivering over the entire creation into stranger or alien hands; without abdicating the right and privilege of personal expression. If the decorator appreciates this right, his function will be somewhat akin to that of the portrait painter; both are bound to represent the individual or family in their performances, each artist using the truest and best methods of art with the added gift of grace or charm of colour which he possesses, the one giving the physical aspect of his client and the other the mental characteristics, circumstances, position and life of the house-owner and his family. This is the true mission of the decorator, although it is not always so understood. What is called business talent may lead him to invent schemes of costliness which relate far more to his own profit than to the wishes or character of the house-owner.

But it is not always that the assistance of the specialist in decoration and furnishing is necessary. There are many homes where both are quite within the scope of the ordinary man or woman of taste. In fact, the great majority of homes come within these lines, and it is to such home-builders that rules, not involving styles, are especially of use.

The principles of truth and harmony, which underlie all beauty, may be secured in the most inexpensive cottage as well as in the broadest and most imposing residence. Indeed, the cottage has the advantage of that most potent ally of beauty—simplicity—a quality which is apt to be conspicuously absent from the schemes of decoration for the palace.

CHAPTER III

BUILDERS' HOUSES

"Mine own hired house."

A large proportion of homes are made in houses which are not owned, but leased, and this prevents each man or family from indicating personal taste in external aspect. A rich man and house-owner may approximate to a true expression of himself even in the outside of his house if he strongly desires it, but a man of moderate means must adapt himself and his family to the house-builder's idea of houses—that is to say, to the idea of the man who has made house-building a trade, and whose experiences have created a form into which houses of moderate cost and fairly universal application may be cast.

Although it is as natural to a man to build or acquire a home as to a bird to build a nest, he has not the same unfettered freedom in construction. He cannot always adapt his house either to the physical or mental size of his family, but must accept what is possible with much the same feeling with which a family of robins might accommodate themselves to a wren's nest, or an oriole to that of a barn-swallow. But the fact remains, that all these accidental homes must, in some way, be brought into harmony with the lives to be lived in them, and the habits and wants of the family; and not only this, they must be made attractive according to the requirements of cultivated society. The effort toward this is instructive, and the pleasure in and enjoyment of the home depends upon the success of the effort. The inmates, as a rule, are quite clear as to what they want to accomplish, but have seldom had sufficient experience to enable them to remedy defects of construction.

There are expedients by which many of the malformations and uglinesses of the ordinary "builder's house" may be greatly ameliorated, various small surgical operations which will remedy badly planned rooms, and dispositions of furniture which will restore proportion. We can even, by judicious distribution of planes of colour, apparently lower or raise a ceiling, and widen or lengthen a room, and these expedients, which belong partly to the experience of the decorator, are based upon laws which can easily be formulated. Every one can learn something of them by the study of faulty rooms and the enjoyment of satisfactory ones. Indeed, I know no surer or more agreeable way of getting wisdom in the art of decoration than by tracing back sensation to its source, and finding out why certain things are utterly satisfactory, and certain others a positive source of discomfort.

In what are called the "best houses" we can make our deductions quite as well as in the most faulty, and sometimes get a lesson of avoidance and a warning against law-breaking which will be quite as useful as if it were learned in less than the best.

There is one fault very common in houses which date from a period of some forty or fifty years back, a fault of disproportionate height of ceilings. In a modern house, if one room is large enough to require a lofty ceiling, the architect will manage to make his second floor upon different levels, so as not to inflict the necessary height of large rooms upon narrow halls and small rooms, which should have only a height proportioned to their size. A ten-foot room with a thirteen-foot ceiling makes the narrowness of the room doubly apparent; one feels shut up between two walls which threaten to come together and squeeze one between them, while, on the other hand, a ten-foot room with a nine-foot ceiling may have a really comfortable and cozy effect.

In this case, what is needed is to get rid of the superfluous four feet, and this can be done by cheating the eye into an utter forgetfulness of them. There must be horizontal divisions of colour which attract the attention and make one oblivious of what is above them.

Every one knows the effect of a paper with perpendicular stripes in apparently heightening a ceiling which is too low, but not every one is equally aware of the contrary effect of horizontal lines of varied surface. But in the use of perpendicular lines it is well to remember that, if the room is small, it will appear still smaller if the wall is divided into narrow spaces by vertical lines. If it is large and the ceiling simply low for the size of the room, a good deal can be done by long, simple lines of drapery in curtains and portieres, or in choosing a paper where the composition of design is perpendicular rather than diagonal.

To apparently lower a high ceiling in a small room, the wall should be treated horizontally in different materials. Three feet of the base can be covered with coarse canvas or buckram and finished with a small wood moulding. Six feet of plain wall above this, painted the same shade as the canvas, makes the space of which the eye is most aware. This space should be finished with a picture moulding, and the four superfluous feet of wall above it must be treated as a part of the ceiling. The cream-white of the actual ceiling should be brought down on the side walls for a space of two feet, and this has the effect of apparently enlarging the room, since the added mass of light tint seems to broaden it. There still remain two feet of space between the picture moulding and ceiling-line which may be treated as a ceiling-border in inconspicuous design upon the same cream ground, the design to be in darker, but of the same tint as the ceiling.

The floor in such a room as this should either be entirely covered with plain carpeting, or, if it has rugs at all, there should be several, as one single rug, not entirely covering the floor, would have the effect of confining the apparent size of the room to the actual size of the rug.

If the doors and windows in such a room are high and narrow, they can be made to come into the scheme by placing the curtain and portiere rods below the actual height and covering the upper space with thin material, either full or plain, of the same colour as the upper wall. A brocaded