When children are very small, it is necessary to have sides to the beds to keep them from falling out.  The beds should be placed so that the light does not shine directly in the children’s eyes in the morning, and there should be plenty of fresh air.  The rest of the night nursery furniture should consist of a dressing-table, a chest of drawers, a night table and some chairs.  There should be a few pictures on the walls hung low, and beautiful and interesting in subjects and treatment.  The fire should be well screened.

Pictures like the “Songs of Childhood,” for instance, would be charming simply framed.  If there is only one nursery for both day and night use, the room should be decorated as a day nursery and the bed-cover made of white dimity with a border of the curtain stuff or made entirely of it.

Curtains

The modern window, with its huge panes of glass and simple framework, makes an insistent demand for curtains.  Without curtains windows of this kind give a blank, staring appearance to the room and also a sense of insecurity in having so many holes in the walls.  The beautiful windows of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Italy, England and France, give no such feeling of incompleteness, for their well-carved frames, and over-windows, and their small panes of glass, were important parts of the decorative scheme.  Windows and doors were more than mere openings in those days, but things have changed, and the hard lines of our perfectly useful windows get on our nerves if we do not soften them with drapery.  In that hopeless time in the last century called “Early Victorian,” when black walnut reigned supreme, the curtains were as terrifying as the curves of the furniture and the colors of the carpets.  Luckily most of us know only from pictures what that time was, but we all have seen enough remnants of its past glories to be thankful for modern ways and days.  The over-draped, stuffy, upholstered nightmares have entirely disappeared, and in their place have come curtains of a high standard of beauty and practicality—­simple, appropriate, and serving the ends they were intended for.

The effect of curtains must be taken into account from both the outside and the inside of the house.  The outside view should show a general similarity of appearance in the windows of each story, in the manner of hanging the curtains and also of material.  The shades throughout the house should be of the same color, and if a different color is needed inside for the sake of the color scheme, either two shades should be used or they should be the double-faced kind.  Shades should also be kept drawn down to the same line, or else be rolled up out of sight, for there is nothing that gives a more ill-kept look to a house than having the shades and curtains at any haphazard height or angle.

And now to “return to our muttons.”  The average window needs two sets of curtains and a shade.  Sometimes a thin net or lace curtain, a "bonne femme" is hung close to the glass, but this is usual only in cities where privacy has to be maintained by main force, or where the curtains of a floor differ greatly.  Thin curtains in combination with side curtains of some thicker material are most often used.