=Matching.=—­Old mahogany furniture which has been repaired may be easily matched by wiping over the new portions with water in which a nodule of lime has been dissolved, or by common soda and water.  The darkeners for general use are dyed oils, logwood, aquafortis, sulphate of iron, and nitrate of silver, with exposure to the sun’s rays.  For new furniture in oak, ash, maple, etc., the process of matching requires care and skill.  When it is desirable to render all the parts in a piece of furniture of one uniform tone or tint, bleach the dark parts with a solution of oxalic acid dissolved in hot water (about two-pennyworth of acid to half a pint of water is a powerful solution); when dry, if this should not be sufficient, apply the white stain (see pp. 11, 12) delicately toned down, or the light parts may be oiled.  For preserving the intermediate tones, coat them with white polish by means of a camel-hair pencil.  On numerous woods, carbonate of soda and bichromate of potash are very effective as darkeners, as are also other preparations of an acid or alkaline nature, but the two given above are the best.

A good way of preparing these darkeners, says the “French Polisher’s Manual,” an excellent little work published in Perth some years since, is to procure twopennyworth of carbonate of soda in powder, and dissolve it in half a pint of boiling water; then have ready three bottles, and label them one, two, three.  Into one put half the solution, and into the other two half a gill each; to number two add an additional gill of water, and to number three two gills.  Then get the same quantity of bichromate of potash, and prepare it in a like manner; you will then have six staining fluids for procuring a series of brown and dark tints suitable for nearly all classes of wood.

The bichromate of potash is useful to darken oak, walnut, beech, or mahogany, but if applied to ash it renders it of a greenish cast.  If a sappy piece of walnut should be used either in the solid or veneer, darken it to match the ground colour, and then fill in the dark markings with a feather and the black stain (see pp. 10, 11).  The carbonate solutions are generally used for dark surfaces, such as rosewood represents, and a still darker shade can be given to any one by oiling over after the stain is dry.  The better way of using these chemical stains is to pour out into a saucer as much as will serve the purpose, and to apply it quickly with a sponge rubbed rapidly and evenly over the surface, and rubbed off dry immediately with old rags.  Dark and light portions, between which the contrast is slight, may be made to match by varnishing the former and darkening the latter with oil, which should remain on it sufficiently long; by this means the different portions may frequently be made to match without having recourse to bleaching or staining.