Year: 1874

While the family Is ont of town during these
hot days Of August is tho season usually seized
upon by painters and upholStercrs To set the
house in order for the coming indoor life OF
Winter People who really use the Summer
TO come close to earth and wind and water,
begin to feel by October something Of the
primitive vagabondage and savagery of the
race stir in their veins. 1t seems to them the
right and natural mode of life to take the
earth for their bed and to claim all out doors
as the homestead bequeathed to them. When
they drive up from the ferries, their baggage
numbering the express wagons, there is some
thing absurd In the idea of shutting them
selves up for the rest of the year in stone and
wooden boxes in which they have barely room
to turn round.


We are beginning of late years to have a
better idea of giving to these wooden and
stone boxes some of the grace of form and
color which Nature so lavishly provides for us
out of doors. We grow bOlder in architecture
and furniture as we are surer of our ground
Warmer coloring is beginning to tone the out
side and inside of our homes colOring more
requisite with our thinner air and colder skies
than in Southern Europe, from which we





great magazines of upholstery, of bric-a-brac
or china in this city and Boston without ac-
knowedgng that the aesthetic taste of the
well-to-do classes must have developed greatly
since the days when hdeous brOcatelles and
enormous chandeliers, gilt and CLASSY, cOnsti-
tuted the perfection of artistic furnishing.
As a people we are not only lavish with
our money to Art, but eager for hints how to
spend it best in her service. Merchants are
shrewd enough to offer us the means Out of
these stores of furniture and decorations any
man with a correct or even delicate taste and
the money may furnish his house as thor
oughly to his satisfaction as anywhere III
Europe The difficulty lies in the lack of taste
in those who have means, or of means where the
knowledge is not wanting. Wealthy Amerl-
cans go to Paris or Italy and bring back a
hodge -podge of Persian carpets and gobelin
tapestries, patched Roman pottery eight
hundred years b. CD and glttering Sevres
and Worcester ware made week ago, carved
cabinets from Italian palaces black with age,
and Morris's marvellous wallpapers, bronzes,
marbles, South American bugs and Egyptian
scarabei, and all these he piles and jams
into his twenty foot brown-stOne house, and
lectures over them TO his VlsltOrS according 10
certain fragmentary rules of art which he has
gathered in the same hap-hazard fashion.


Fashion correspondents tell us that taste
is developing lately for the rocco in furni-
ture. There is demand for even the old
clocks and tables used by our grandfathers.
Most of us remember with a certain satisfac-
ton which no modern drawing-room gives us,
some old-fashioned farmhouse living room,"
with the eight-day clock in one corner and
the angular cupboard in the other. We do
not know why the floor, covered with its
green rag carpet, the two Shaker rocking
chairs where the old people sat, the open fire,
the table with the country paper and pair
of spectacles upon it, should come up before
us with certain sense of satisfaction, beauty,
and repOse. 1t is not the cleanliness of the
room. The parlor of n magnate in Western
town is cleaner, yet We remember it with a
shudder; the violent hOwer-basket in the
carpet, the satin curtains, the blue brocatele
sofas, the enormous Parian vases on the
mantel, all staring into great mirror, and
telling it what they cost-who among those
who are in good society" has not seen it all 7
Tue secret We suggest IL the plenishipg Of