[Illustration:  TRUE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY SIMPLICITY.  NOW THE AUTHOR’S DINING ROOM

Photo by John Runyon]

The piece was an average example of the overstuffed, leather-upholstered era.  It is still part of the family furnishings but it has merged quietly and inoffensively with its better born companions.  Plain muslin has taken the place of the leather and over it has been fitted a heavy slip cover of sage green rep.  No one exclaims over its beauty but everybody sits in it, even the most ardent admirer of the delicate Hepplewhite side chair standing nearby.

This brings us to the question of whether the additions in furniture should be antiques, reproductions, or modern pieces.  Again, this depends on the type of house and the taste of those who occupy it.  The person who buys or builds the salt box or similar type of cottage will naturally want the furnishings in keeping.  Consciously or unconsciously, he will lean towards antiques.  Further, those that look best in the 18th or early 19th century farm cottage are not necessarily expensive.  Simple pine pieces, made by the village cabinet-maker or, sometimes, by an ingenious farmer in his leisure hours; Windsor and slat-back chairs; low four-post beds; trestle or tuckaway tables; even an occasional Victorian piece; all, if on simple lines, fit into such a house as though made for it.

One of the many advantages of furnishing with antiques is that there is nothing final about them.  If you buy a piece at a proper price and after due time do not like it or it fails to fit into your decorative scheme, you can sell for as much as you paid for it and often a little more.  On the other hand, new furniture or reproductions become merely second-hand pieces as soon as you have bought and put them to use.  Only at distinct financial loss can you change them in six months or a year for others.  That is a good commercial reason for the growing tendency to furnish with antiques.  We believe, however, that the real reason is the effect of individuality gained by the use of pieces made by old craftsmen a century or more ago when things were built to last and mass production and obsolescence were unknown terms.

Several years ago, a family bought a house of the type prevalent in the region of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, “as a summer shack for three or four months in the year.”  The floors with their wide boards were simply scrubbed, waxed, and left in the natural tone taken on by old wood in the course of a hundred and fifty years.  All trim and paneling were painted a soft apple green, and walls and ceilings throughout were calcimined a deep cream color.  Curtains of unbleached muslin were hung at the small, many-paned windows.  The furnishings came out of the attic of their Boston home where the contents of a great-grandfather’s New Hampshire farmhouse had been stored.