will often give the exact note which is needed to preserve the room from
monotony and insipidity. A stair-carpet is a valuable point to make in a
hall, and it is well to reserve all opposing colour for this one place,
which, as it rises, meets all sight on a level, and makes its contrast
directly and unmistakably. A stair-carpet has other reasons for use in a
country-house than aesthetic ones, as the stairs are conductors of sound
to all parts of the house, and should therefore be muffled, and because
a carpeted stair furnishes much safer footing for the two family
extremes of childhood and age.

The furniture of the hall should not be fantastic, as some
cabinet-makers seem to imagine. Impossible twists in the supports of
tables and chairs are perhaps more objectionable in this first
vestibule or entrance to the house than elsewhere, because the mind is
not quite free from out-of-door influences, or ready to take pleasure in
the vagaries of the human fancy. Simple chairs, settles, and tables,
more solid perhaps than is desirable in other parts of the house, are
what the best natural, as well as the best cultivated, taste demands. If
there is one place more than another where a picture performs its full
work of suggestion and decoration, it is in a hall which is otherwise
bare of ornament. Pictures in dining-rooms make very little impression
as pictures, because the mind is engrossed with the first and natural
purpose of the room, and consequently not in a waiting and easily
impressible mood; but in a hall, if one stops for even a moment, the
thoughts are at leisure, and waiting to be interested. Aside from the
colour effect, which may be so managed as to be very valuable, pictures
hung in a hall are full of suggestion of wider mental and physical life,
and, like books, are indications of the tastes and experiences of the
family. Of course there are country-houses where the halls are built
with fireplaces, and windows commanding favourite views, and are really
intended for family sitting-rooms and gathering-places; in this case it
is generally preceded by a vestibule which carries the character of an
entrance-hall, leaving the large room to be furnished more luxuriously,
as is proper to a sitting-room.

The dining-room shares with the hall a purpose common to the life of the
family, and, while it admits of much more variety and elaboration, that
which is true of the hall is equally true of the dining-room, that it
sho