the long, low, open bookcases, above which a large foliage tapestry was hung.  On the other walls were modern paintings with antique frames of dulled gold, while a Louis XVI inlaid desk stood across one corner, and there was an old Italian oval table of black wood, with great, gold birds, as pedestal and legs, at which we dined simply, using fine old silver, and foreign pottery.  This room was responsible for starting more than one person on the pursuit of the antique, for pervading it was a magic atmosphere, that wizard touch which comes of knowing, loving and demanding beautiful things, and then treating them very humanly.  Use your lovely vases for your flowers.  Hang your modern painting; but let its link with the faded tapestry be the dull, old frame.  To be explicit, use lustreless frames and faded colours with old furniture and tapestry.  Your grandmother wears mauves and greys—­not bright red.

If your taste is for modern painted furniture and vivid Bakst colours in cushions and hangings, take your lovely old tapestry away.  Speaking of tapestries, do not imagine that they can never be used in small rooms and narrow halls.  Plate XIV shows an illustration of a hall in an old-fashioned country house, that was so narrow that it aroused despair.  We call attention to the fact that it gains greatly in width from the perspective shown in the tapestry, one of the rare, old, painted kind, which depicts distance, wide vistas and a scene flooded with light. (An architectural picture can often be used with equally good results.) To increase size of this hall, the woodwork, walls and carpets were kept the same shade of pale-grey.  The landscape paper in our Colonial houses of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, often large in design, pushed back the walls to the same amazing degree.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 1:  Louis XIV, XV, and XVI.]

CHAPTER XIV

PERIODS IN FURNITURE

Periods in furniture are amazingly interesting if one plunges into the story, not with tense nerves, but gaily, for mere amusement, and then floats gently, in a drifting mood.  One gathers in this way many sparkling historical anecdotes, and much substantial data really not so cumbersome as some imagine!

To know anything at all about a subject one must begin at the beginning, and to make the long run seems a mere spin in an auto, let us at once remind you that the whole fascinating tale lies between the covers of one delightful book, the “Illustrated History of Furniture,” by Frederick Litchfield, published by Truslove & Hanson, London, and by John Lane, New York.  There are other books—­many of them—­but first exhaust Litchfield and apply what he tells you as you wander through public and private collections of furniture.

If you care for furniture at all, this book, which tells all that is known of its history, will prove highly instructive.