Note the Empire electric light fixtures in hand-carved gilded wood, reproductions of an antique silver applique.  Even the steam radiators are here cleverly concealed by wooden cases made after Empire designs.

     The walls are white and panelled in wood also white.

[Illustration:  Dining-room in Country House, Showing Modern Painted Furniture.  Style Directoire.]

The earliest garments of Egypt were of cotton and hemp, or mallow, resembling flax.  The older Egyptians never knew silks in any form, nor did the Israelites, nor any of the ancients.  The earliest account of this material is given by Aristotle (fourth century).  It was brought into Western Europe from China, via India, the Red Sea and Persia, and the first to weave it outside the Orient was a maiden on the Isle of Cos, off the coast of Asia Minor, producing a thin gauze-like tissue worn by herself and companions, the material resembling the Seven Veils of Salome.  To-day those tiny bits of gauze one sees laid in between the leaves of old manuscript to protect the illuminations, as our publishers use sheets of tissue paper, are said to be examples of this earliest form of woven silk.

The Romans used silk at first only for their women, as it was considered not a masculine material, but gradually they adopted it for the festival robes of men, Titus and Vespasian being among those said to have worn it.

The first silk looms were set up in the royal palaces of the Roman kings in the year 533 A.D.  The raw material was brought from the East for a long time but in the sixth century two Greek monks, while in China, studied the method of rearing silk worms and obtaining the silk, and on their departure are said to have concealed the eggs of silk worms in their staves.  They are accredited with introducing the manufacture of silk into Greece and hence into Western Europe.  After that Greece, Persia and Asia Minor made this material, and Byzantium was famed for its silks, the actual making of which got into the hands of the Jews and was for a long time controlled by them.

Metals (gold, silver and copper) were flattened out and cut into narrow strips for winding around cotton twists.  These were the gold and silver threads used in weaving.  The Moors and Spaniards instead of metals used strips of gilded parchment for weaving with the silk.

We know that England was weaving silk in the thirteenth century, and velvets seem to have been used at a very early date.  The introduction of silk and velvet into different countries had an immediate and much-needed influence in civilising the manners of society.  It is hard to realise that in the thirteenth century when Edward I married Eleanor of Castile, the highest nobles of England when resting at their ease, stretched at full length on the straw-covered floors of baronial halls, and jeered at the Spanish courtiers who hung the walls and stretched the floors of Edward’s castle with silks in preparation for his Spanish bride.