and matches them to her hair and eyes, and, with a bow here, and a bit of fringe there, and a button somewhere else, dazzles us into thinking that she has an infinity of beautiful attire.  Our rooms are new and pretty of themselves, to begin with; the tint of the paper, and the rich coloring of the border, corresponding with the furniture and carpets, will make them seem prettier.  And now for arrangement.  Take this front-room.  I propose to fill those two recesses each side of the fireplace with my books, in their plain pine cases, just breast-high from the floor:  they are stained a good dark color, and nobody need stick a pin in them to find out that they are not rosewood.  The top of these shelves on either side to be covered with the same stuff as the furniture, finished with a crimson fringe.  On top of the shelves on one side of the fireplace I shall set our noble Venus di Milo, and I shall buy at Cicci’s the lovely Clytie and put it the other side.  Then I shall get of Williams and Everett two of their chromo-lithographs, which give you all the style and charm of the best English water-color school.  I will have the lovely Bay of Amalfi over my Venus, because she came from those suns and skies of Southern Italy, and I will hang Lake Como over my Clytie.  Then, in the middle, over the fireplace, shall be ’our picture.’  Over each door shall hang one of the lithographed angel-heads of the San Sisto, to watch our going-out and coming-in; and the glorious Mother and Child shall hang opposite the Venus di Milo, to show how Greek and Christian unite in giving the noblest type to womanhood.  And then, when we have all our sketches and lithographs framed and hung here and there, and your flowers blooming as they always do, and your ivies wandering and rambling as they used to, and hanging in the most graceful ways and places, and all those little shells and ferns and vases, which you are always conjuring with, tastefully arranged, I’ll venture to say that our rooms will be not only pleasant, but beautiful, and that people will oftener say, ‘How beautiful!’ when they enter, than if we spent three times the money on new furniture.”

In the course of a year after this conversation, one and another of my acquaintances were often heard speaking of John Merton’s house.  “Such beautiful rooms,—­so charmingly furnished,—­you must go and see them.  What does make them so much pleasanter than those rooms in the other house, which have everything in them that money can buy?” So said the folk,—­for nine people out of ten only feel the effect of a room, and never analyze the causes from which it flows:  they know that certain rooms seem dull and heavy and confused, but they don’t know why; that certain others seem cheerful, airy, and beautiful, but they know not why.  The first exclamation, on entering John’s parlors, was so often, “How beautiful!” that it became rather a by-word in the family.  Estimated by their mere money-value, the articles in the rooms