Avoid serving a lunch in an artificially lighted room.  This, like a permanent tea-table, is an almost extinct fashion.  Neither was sensible, because inappropriate, and therefore bad form.  The only possible reason for shutting out God’s sunlight and using artificial lights, is when the function is to begin by daylight and continue until after nightfall.

If in doubt as to what is good, go often to museums and compare what you own, or have seen and think of owning, with objects in museum collections.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

FADS IN COLLECTING

In a New York home one room is devoted to a so-called panier fleuri collection which in this case means that each article shows the design of a basket holding flowers or fruit.  The collection is to-day so unique and therefore so valuable, that it has been willed to a museum, but its creation as a collection, was entirely a chance occurrence.  The design of a basket trimmed with flowers happened to appeal to the owner, and if we are not mistaken, the now large collection had its beginning in the casual purchase of a little old pendant found in a forgotten corner of Europe.  The owner wore it, her friends saw it, and gradually associated the panier fleuri with her, which resulted in many beautiful specimens of this design being sought out for her by wanderers at home and abroad.  To-day this collection includes old silks, laces, jewellery, wax pictures, old prints, some pieces of antique furniture, snuffboxes and ornaments in glass, china, silver, etc.

Every museum is the result of fads in collecting, and when one considers all that is meant by this heading, which sounds so trifling and unimportant to the layman, it will not seem strange that we strongly recommend it as a dissipation!

At first, quite naturally, the collector makes mistakes; but it is through his mistakes that he learns, and absolutely nothing gives such a zest to a stroll in the city, a tramp in the country, or an unexpected delay in an out-of-the-way town, as to have this collecting bee in your bonnet.  How often when travelling we have rejoiced when the loss of a train or a mistake in time-table, meant an unexpected opportunity to explore for junk in some old shop, or, perhaps, to bargain with a pretty peasant girl who hoarded a beloved heirloom, of entrancing interest to us (and worth a pile of money really), while she lived happily on cider and cheese!

It is doubtless the experience of every lover of the old and the curious, that one never regrets the expenses incurred in this quest of the antique, but one does eternally regret one’s economies.  The writer suffers now, after years have elapsed, in some cases, at the memory of treasures resisted when chanced upon in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Bohemia—­where not!  Always one says, “Oh, well, I shall come back again!” But there are so many “pastures green,” and it is often difficult to retrace one’s steps.