ines, and confine the
flower-border into limits which justify its freedom of composition.

If one wishes to mount a favourite motto or quotation on the walls,
where it may give constant suggestion or pleasure--or even be a help to
thoughtful and conscientious living--there can be no better fashion than
the style of the old illuminated missals. Dining-rooms and
chimney-pieces are often very appropriately decorated in this way; the
words running on scrolls which are half unrolled and half hidden, and
showing a conventionalised background of fruit and flowers.

In all these things the _knowingness_, which is the result of study,
tells very strongly--and it is quite worth while to give a good deal of
study to the subject of this kind of decoration before expending the
requisite amount of work upon a painted frieze.

Canvas friezes have the excellent merit of being not only durable and
cleanable, but they belong to the category of pictures; to what Ruskin
calls "portable art," and one need not grudge the devotion of
considerable time, study, and effort to their doing, since they are
really detachable property, and can be removed from one house or room
and carried to another at the owner's or artist's will.

There is room for the exercise of much artistic ability in this
direction, as the fact of being able to paint the decoration in parts
and afterward place it, makes it possible for an amateur to do much for
the enhancement of her own house.

More than any other room in the house, the bedroom will show personal
character. Even when it is not planned for particular occupation, the
characteristics of the inmate will write themselves unmistakably in the
room. If the college boy is put in the white and gold bedroom for even a
vacation period, there will shortly come into its atmosphere an element
of sporting and out-of-door life. Banners and balls and bats, and
emblems of the "wild thyme" order will colour its whiteness; and life of
the growing kind make itself felt in the midst of sanctity. In the same
way, girls would change the bare asceticism of a monk's cell into a
bower of lilies and roses; a fit place for youth and unpraying
innocence.

The bedrooms of a house are a pretty sure test of the liberality of
mind and understanding of character of the mother or house-ruler. As
each room is in a certain sense the home of the individual occupant,
almost the shell of his or her mind, there will be something narrow and
desp