them.  Better than either are the plain tints, which give you, in fact, all you require; a modification of the cold white wall, and the most effective background for pictures and other furnishing.  As much ornament as you please in the border at the top, and at the bottom, too, if the rooms are high enough.  All horizontal lines and subdivisions reduce the apparent height of the room.  Indeed, you may use trimming without limit, either of paper or paint, wood and gilt moldings, provided they are well used.  Color, after all, is the main thing.  If there is any good reason for putting this upon paper and then sticking the paper to the wall, I’ve not learned it.  It is cheaper, cleaner, and better to apply it directly to the plastering, either in oil or water-colors.  Oil is the best; water the cheapest.  In any case, the best quality of plastering is none too good.  For the papering it may be left smooth, but for painting, especially with distemper, the rough coarse-grained surface is very much the best.  The chief objection to stucco arises from its being a cheap material, easily wrought.  It is so often introduced as if quantity would compensate for quality,—­a common error in other things than stucco.  Though often desirable and appropriate, as a general rule the more the worse.  No amount of gilding will give it anything but a frail, often tawdry appearance, that does not improve, but deteriorates, with age.

[Illustration:  WOODWORK ON PLASTERED WALLS]

Wainscoting is always in order; it is a question of harmony, when and where to use it.  What you have in mind is really an extended and ornamented base.  Of course, it enriches the room, but it begins a work to which there is no limit.  It should be supplemented by a corresponding wood cornice at the top of the room, and between the two as much decorative woodwork as you can afford; until “the walls of the house within, the floor of the house, and the walls of the ceilings” are carved with “cherubims and palm-trees and open flowers.”  A costly wainscot at the base of the walls, with paper and stucco above, seems to me a great lack of harmony.  I would spread my richness more evenly.  In using different kinds of wood, the raised portions, being more exposed, may be of hard varieties, the sunken portions of softer materials, even lath and plaster, which may be frescoed, covered with some rich colored plain paper, or hung with violet velvet, according to your taste and means.  The old-fashioned chair-rail seems to me a sensible institution It occupies the debatable ground between use and beauty, and may therefore be somewhat enriched.  The plastering beneath it may be given a different tint from that above, and when the walls are high its effect is good.  It is really carrying out the idea of panelling, to which there is hardly a limit in the way of variety.

Some of your questions have led me a little way from the building toward the furnishing, but I’ve tried to dispose of them categorically, and am now ready for another lot.