Next, fill the cracks with putty.  The most practical method is to stain the floors some dark colour; mahogany, walnut, weathered oak, black, green or any colour you may prefer, and then wax them.  This protects the colour.  In a room where daintiness is desired, and economy is not important, as for instance in a room with white painted furniture, you may have white floors and a square carpet rug of some plain dark toned velvet; or, if preferred, the painted border may be in come delicate colour to match the wall paper.  To resume, if you like a dull finish, have the wax rubbed in at intervals, but if you like a glossy background for rugs, use a heavy varnish after the floors are coloured.  This treatment we suggest for more or less formal rooms.  In bedrooms, put down an inexpensive filling as a background for rugs, or should yours be a summer home, use straw matting.

For halls and dining-rooms a plain dark-coloured linoleum, costing not less than two dollars a yard makes and inexpensive floor covering.  If it is waxed it becomes not only very durable but, also, extremely effective, suggesting the dark tiles in Italian houses.  We do not advise the purchase of the linoleums which represent inlaid floors, as they are invariably unsuccessful imitations.

If it is necessary to economise and your brass bedstead must be used even though you dislike it, you can have it painted the colour of your walls.  It requires a number of coats.  A soft pearl grey is good.  Then use a colour, or colours, in your silk or chintz bedspread.  Sun-proof material in a solid colour makes an attractive cover, with a narrow fringe in several colours straight around the edges and also, forming a circle or square on the top of the bed-cover.

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If your gas or electric fixtures are ugly and you cannot afford more attractive ones, buy very cheap, perfectly plain, ones and paint them to match the walls, giving decorative value to them with coloured silk shades.

PLATE III

Shows one end of a very small bedroom with modern painted furniture, so simple in line and decoration that it would be equally appropriate either for a young man or for a young woman.  We say “young,” because there is something charmingly fresh and youthful about this type of furniture.

The colour is pale pistache green, with mulberry lines, the same combination of colours being repeated in painting the walls which have a grey background lined with mulberry—­the broad stripe—­and a narrow green line.  The bed cover is mulberry, the lamp shade is green with mulberry and grey in the fringe.

     On the walls are delightful old prints framed in black glass with
     gold lines, and a narrow moulding of gilded oak, an old style
     revived.

     A square of antique silk covers the night table, and the floor is
     polished hard wood.