unded by noble homes, and almost the limit of
luxurious city life was Union Square. The house fronts to the north,
consequently the dining-room, which is at the back, is flooded with
sunshine. The ceiling is higher than it would be in a modern house, and
the windows extend to the floor, and rise nearly to the ceiling, far
indeed above the flat arches of the doorways with their rococo
flourishes. This extension of window-frame, and the heavy and elaborate
plaster cornice so deep as to be almost a frieze, and the equally
elaborate centre-piece, are the features which must have made it a room
difficult to ameliorate.

I could fancy it must have been an ugly room in the old days when its
walls were probably white, and the great mahogany doors were spots of
colour in prevailing spaces of blankness. Now, however, any one at all
learned in art, or sensitive to beauty, would pronounce it a beautiful
room. The way in which the ceiling with its heavy centre-piece and
plaster cornice is treated is especially interesting. The whole of this
is covered with an ochre-coloured bronze, while the walls and
door-casings are painted a dark indigo, which includes a faint trace of
green. Over this wall-colour, and joining the cornice, is carried a
stencil design in two coloured bronzes which seem to repeat the light
and shadow of the cornice mouldings, and this apparently extends the
cornice into a frieze which ends faintly at a picture-moulding some
three feet below. This treatment not only lowers the ceiling, which is
in construction too high for the area of the room, but blends it with
the wall in a way which imparts a certain richness of effect to all the
lower space.

The upper part of the windows, to the level of the picture-moulding, is
covered with green silk, overlaid with an applique of the same in a
design somewhat like the frieze, so that it seems to carry the frieze
across the space of light in a green tracery of shadow. The same green
extends from curtain-rods at the height of the picture-moulding into
long under-curtains of silk, while the over-curtains are of indigo
coloured silk-canvas which matches the walls.

The portieres separating the dining-room from the drawing-room are of a
wonderfully rich green brocade--the colour of which answers to the green
of the silk under-curtains across the room, while the design ranges
itself indisputably with the period of the plaster work. The blue and
green of the curtains and portier