rooms is rather a difficult point. Modern tastes demand comfort and brightness, and yet there is always the dread of too glaring contrasts, and an inharmonious groundwork. Quite lately I saw a fine old-time wainscotted room, whose walls and floor had taken a rich dark gloss from age, brightened immensely and harmoniously by four or five of those large Indian cotton rugs in dark blue and white, to be bought now-a-days cheaply enough in Regent Street. The china in this room was of Delft ware, also blue and white, and it had short full curtains of a bright French stuff, wherein blue lines alternated with a rich red, hanging in the deep windows, whilst colour was given in a dusky corner by a silken screen of embroidered peonies. A Turkish carpet is of course inadmissible in a bedroom, and the modern Persian rugs are too gaudy to harmonise well with the sober tone of a wainscotted bedroom, but it is quite possible to find delicious rugs and strips of carpeting in greenish blue copied from Eastern designs. The difficulty is perhaps most simply met by a carpet of a very dark red, with the smallest possible wave or suggestion of black in it, either in strips or in a square, stopping short within two feet or so of the walls. I know a suite of old-fashioned bedrooms where the floor is covered with quite an ecclesiastical-looking carpet, and it looks very suitable, warm and bright, and thoroughly in keeping. In a house of moderate size there is nothing I like so much as the whole of a bedroom floor being carpeted in the same way—landings, passages, dressing-rooms, and all—and on the whole, taking our dingy climate into consideration, a well-toned red carpet or nondescript blue will generally be found the most suitable.

Strange to say, next to red carpets white ones wear the best, but they make such a false and glaring effect, that they cannot be considered appropriate even for a pretty bowery bedroom, half dressing-room, half boudoir. With ordinarily fair wear white carpets only take a creamy tint as they get older, and then their bouquets and borders, have a chance of fading into better harmony. But most of the designs of these carpets are so radically wrong, so utterly objectionable from the beginning, that the best which can be hoped from time is that it will obliterate them altogether. It is true we flatter ourselves that we have grown beyond the days of enormous boughs and branches of exaggerated leaves and blossoms daubed on a crude ground, but have we escaped from the dominion of patterns, more minute it is true, but quite as much outside the pale of good taste? What is to be said in defence of a design which, when its colours are fresh, is so shaded as to represent some billowy and uneven surface, fastened at intervals by yellow nails? or spots of white flowers or stars on a grass-green ground? The only carpet of that sort of white and green which I ever liked had tiny sprays of white heather on a soft green ground, in the miniature drawing-room of a Scotch shooting-box. There, it was so appropriate, so thoroughly in keeping with even the view out of the windows, with the heathery chintz, the roe-deer’s heads on the panels of the wall, that it looked better on the floor than anything else could possibly have done. Morris has Kidderminster carpets for bedrooms, in pale pink, buff, and blue, &c., which are simply perfect in harmony of colour and design.

People who consider themselves good managers are very apt to turn the half worn-out drawing-room carpet into one of the bedrooms, but this is not a good plan, for it seldom matches the draperies, and is also apt to become frowsy and fusty. I am not so extravagant as to recommend that a good carpet with plenty of possibilities of wear yet in it should be thrown away because it is not suitable for a bedroom. There are many ways and means of disposing of such things, and even the threadbare remains of an originally good and costly carpet can find a market of its own. What I should like to see, especially in all London bedrooms, is a fresh, inexpensive carpet of unobtrusive colours, which can be constantly taken away and cleaned or renewed, rather than a more costly, rich-looking floor-covering, which will surely in time become and remain more or less dirty. But light carpets are seldom soft in tone, and I should be inclined to suggest felt as a groundwork, if the bare boards are inadmissible, with large rugs thrown down before the fireplace, dressing and writing-tables, &c. These should of course contrast harmoniously with the walls. If you have a room of which the style is a little too sombre, then lighten it and brighten it by all the means in your power. If it be inclined to be garish and glaring, then subdue it.

People cannot always create, as it were, the place in which they are obliged to live. One may find oneself placed in a habitation perfectly contrary to every principle of correct taste as well as opposed to one’s individual preferences. But that is such an opportunity! out of unpromising materials and surroundings you have to make a room, whether bedroom or boudoir, which will take the impression of your own state. As long as a woman possesses a pair of hands and her work-basket, a little hammer and a few tin-tacks, it is hard if she need live in a room which is actually ugly. I don’t suppose any human being except a gipsy has ever dwelt in so many widely-apart lands as I have. Some of these homes have been in the infancy of civilisation, and yet I have never found it necessary to endure, for more than the first few days of my sojourn, anything in the least ugly or uncomfortable. Especially pretty has my sleeping-room always been, though it has sometimes looked out over the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, at others, up a lovely New Zealand valley, or, in still earlier days, over a waving West Indian “grass-piece.” But I may as well get out the map of the world at once, and try to remember the various places to which my wandering destiny has led me. All the moral I want to draw from this geographical digression is that I can assert from my own experience—which after all is the only true standpoint of assertion—that it is possible to have really pretty, as well as thoroughly comfortable dwelling-places even though they may lie thousands of miles away from the heart of civilisation, and hundreds of leagues distant from a shop or store of any kind. I mean this as an encouragement—not a boast.

Chintz is what naturally suggests itself to the inquirer’s mind as most suitable for the drapery of a bedroom, and there is a great deal to be said in its favour. First of all, its comparative cheapness and the immense variety of its designs. Cretonnes are comely too, if care be taken to avoid the very gaudy ones. If there is no objection on the score of difficulty of keeping clean, I am fond, in a modern bedroom, of curtains all of one colour, some soft, delicate tint of blue or rose, with a great deal of patternless white muslin either over it or beneath it as drapery to the window. This leaves you more free for bright, effective bits of colour for sofa, table-cover, &c., and the feeling of the window curtains can be carried out again in the screen. A bedroom, to be really comfortable, should always have one or even two screens, if it be large enough. They give a great air of comfort to a room, and are exceedingly convenient as well as pretty. The fashion of draped toilet-tables is passing away so rapidly that they cannot be depended upon for colour in a