room, though we get the advantage in other ways. So we must fall back upon the old idea of embroidered quilts once more to help with colour and tone in our bedrooms. They are made in a hundred different and almost equally pretty designs. Essentially modern quilts for summer can be made of lace or muslin over pink or blue batiste or silk to match the tints of the room; quilts of linen embroidered with deliciously artistic bunches of fruit or flowers at the edge and corners; quilts of eider-down covered with silk, for preference, or if our means will not permit so costly a material, then of one colour, such as Turkey red, in twilled cotton. I have never liked those gay imitation Indian quilts. They generally “swear” at everything else in the room.

But there are still more beautiful quilts of an older style and date. I have seen some made of coarse linen, with a pattern running in parallel strips four or six inches wide, formed by pulling out the threads to make the groundwork of an insertion. The same idea looks well also when carried out in squares or a diamond-shaped pattern. Then there are lovely quilts of muslin embroidered in delicate neutral tints, which look as if they came straight from Cairo or Bagdad, but which have never been out of England, and owe their lightness and beauty to the looms of Manchester.

One of the prettiest and simplest bedrooms I know had its walls covered with lining paper of the very tenderest tint of green, on which were hung some pretty pastel sketches, all in the same style. The chintzes, or rather cretonnes, were of a creamy white ground with bunches of lilacs powdered on them, and the carpet, of a soft green, had also a narrow border with bouquets of lilacs at each corner. The screens were of muslin over lilac batiste, and the quilt of the simple bedstead had been worked by the owner’s own fingers, of linen drawn out in threads. The very tiles of the fireplace—for this pretty room had an open hearth with a sort of basket for a coal fire in the middle—and the china of the basin-stand as well as the door-handles and plates, were all decorated with the same flower, and although essentially a modern room in a modern house, it was exquisitely fresh and uncommon. This was partly owing to the liberal use of the leaves of the lilac, which are in form so exceedingly pretty.

In an old-fashioned house if I wanted the draperies and quilt of my bedroom to be thoroughly harmonious I should certainly go to the Royal School of Art Needlework in the Exhibition Road for designs, as they possess extraordinary facilities for getting at specimens of the best early English and French needlework, and they can imitate even the materials to perfection. I saw some curtains the other day in a modern boudoir from this Royal School of Art Needlework. They were of a delicate greenish blue silk-rep, which hung in delicious round folds and had a bold and simple design of conventionalised lilies in a material like Tussore silk appliqué-d with a needlework edge. Of course they were intended for a purely modern room, but there were also some copies of draperies which went beautifully with Chippendale chairs and lovely old straight up and down cupboards and settees.

There is rather a tendency in the present day to make both bedrooms and boudoirs gloomy; a horrible vision of a room with walls the colour of a robin’s egg (dots and all) and black furniture, rises up before me, and the owner of this apartment could not be induced to brighten up her gloom by so much as a gay pincushion. Now our grandmothers understood much better, though probably no one ever said a word to them about it, how necessary it was to light up dark recesses by contrasts. You would generally have found an exquisite old blue and white Delft jar full of scented rose-leaves, a gay beau-pot full of poppies, or even a spinning-wheel with its creamy bundle of flax or wool bound by a scarlet ribbon, in the unregarded corner of a dingy passage, and I think we do not bear in mind enough how bright and gay the costumes of those days used to be. To a new house, furnished according to the present rage for old-fashioned decoration, our modern sombre apparel is no help. We do not lighten up our rooms a bit now by our dress, except perhaps in summer, but generally we sit, clad in dingiest tints of woollen material, or in very inartistic black silk, amid furniture which was originally designed as a sort of background to much gay and gallant clothing, to flowered sacques and powdered heads, to bright steel buttons and buckles and a thousand points of colour and light. Let us follow their old good example thoroughly, if we do it at all, and do our best to brighten the dull nooks and corners which will creep into all dwellings, by our attire, as well as in all other ways.

CHAPTER III.
BEDS AND BEDDING.