We leave America early in June, tired out with the breathless business of living, and find ourselves in our old-world house and garden.  We fall asleep to the accompaniment of the tiny piping of the little people in bur garden.  We awake to the matins of the birds.  We breakfast on the stone terrace, with boughs of trees and clouds for our roof, and as we look out over the masses of blue flowers and the smooth green tapis vert, over the arched trelliage with its fountains and its marbles, the great trees back of our domain frame the supremely beautiful towers of the Chateau le Magnificent, and we are far happier than anyone deserves to be in this wicked world!

XX

NOTES ON MANY THINGS

A LITTLE TALK ON CLOCKS.

The selection of proper clocks for one’s house is always long-drawn-out, a pursuit of real pleasure.  Clocks are such necessary things the thoughtless woman is apt to compromise, when she doesn’t find exactly the right one.  How much wiser and happier she would be if she decided to depend upon an ordinary alarm clock until the proper clock was discovered!  If she made a hobby of her quest for clocks she would find much amusement, many other valuable objects by-the-way, and finally exactly the right clocks for her rooms.

Everyone knows the merits and demerits of the hundreds of clocks of commerce, and it isn’t for me to go into the subject of grandfather-clocks, bracket clocks, and banjo clocks, when there are so many excellent books on the subject.  I plead for the graceful clocks of old France, the objets d’art so lovingly designed by the master sculptors of the Eighteenth Century.  I plead particularly for the wall clocks that are so conspicuous in all good French houses, and so unusual in our own country.

[Illustration:  A PROPER WRITING-TABLE IN THE DRAWING-ROOM.]

Just as surely as our fine old English and American clocks have their proper niches, so the French clocks belong inevitably in certain rooms.  You may never find just the proper clock for this room, but that is your fault.  There are hundreds of lovely old models available.  Why shouldn’t some manufacturer have them reproduced?

I feel that if women generally knew how very decorative and distinguished a good wall clock may be, the demand would soon create a supply of these beautiful objects.  It would be quite simple for the manufacturers to make them from the old models.  The late Mr. Pierpont Morgan gave to the Metropolitan Museum the magnificent Hoentschel collection of objets d’art, hoping to stimulate the interest of American designers and artisans in the fine models of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.  There are some very fine examples of wall clocks in this collection which might be copied in carved wood by the students of manual training schools, if the manufacturers refuse to be interested.