like Dr. Richardson what a nasty and unwholesome custom this is, so I will only say that it looks nasty and unwholesome.  Happily, however, it is now a custom so much broken into that we may consider it doomed; for in all houses that pretend to any taste of arrangement, the carpet is now a rug, large it may be, but at any rate not looking immovable, and not being a trap for dust in the corners.  Still I would go further than this even and get rich people no longer to look upon a carpet as a necessity for a room at all, at least in the summer.  This would have two advantages:  1st, It would compel us to have better floors (and less drafty), our present ones being one of the chief disgraces to modern building; and 2ndly, since we should have less carpet to provide, what we did have we could afford to have better.  We could have a few real works of art at the same price for which we now have hundreds of yards of makeshift machine-woven goods.  In any case it is a great comfort to see the actual floor; and the said floor may be, as you know, made very ornamental by either wood mosaic, or tile and marble mosaic; the latter especially is such an easy art as far as mere technicality goes, and so full of resources, that I think it is a great pity it is not used more.  The contrast between its grey tones and the rich positive colour of Eastern carpet-work is so beautiful, that the two together make satisfactory decoration for a room with little addition.

When wood mosaic or parquet-work is used, owing to the necessary simplicity of the forms, I think it best not to vary the colour of the wood.  The variation caused by the diverse lie of the grain and so forth, is enough.  Most decorators will be willing, I believe, to accept it as an axiom, that when a pattern is made of very simple geometrical forms, strong contrast of colour is to be avoided.

So much for the floor.  As for its fellow, the ceiling, that is, I must confess, a sore point with me in my attempts at making the best of it.  The simplest and most natural way of decorating a ceiling is to show the underside of the joists and beams duly moulded, and if you will, painted in patterns.  How far this is from being possible in our modern makeshift houses, I suppose I need not say.  Then there is a natural and beautiful way of ornamenting a ceiling by working the plaster into delicate patterns, such as you see in our Elizabethan and Jacobean houses; which often enough, richly designed and skilfully wrought as they are, are by no means pedantically smooth in finish—­nay, may sometimes be called rough as to workmanship.  But, unhappily there are few of the lesser arts that have fallen so low as the plasterer’s.  The cast work one sees perpetually in pretentious rooms is a mere ghastly caricature of ornament, which no one is expected to look at if he can help it.  It is simply meant to say, ‘This house is built for a rich man.’  The very material of it is all wrong, as, indeed,