al or civilised man, and for this
reason we are constantly tempted to disguise the limit and to cover the
wall in such a way as shall interest and make us forget our bounds. In
this case, the idea of decoration is, to make the walls a barrier of
colour only, instead of hard, unyielding masonry; to take away the sense
of being shut in a box, and give instead freedom to thought and pleasure
to the sense.

It is the effect of shut-in-ness which the square and rigid walls of a
room give that makes drapery so effective and welcome, and which also
gives value to the practice of covering walls with silks or other
textiles. The softened surface takes away the sense of restraint. We
hang our walls with pictures, or cover them with textiles, or with paper
which carries design, or even colour them with
pigments--something--anything, which will disguise a restraining bound,
or make it masquerade as a luxury.

This effort or instinct has set in motion the machinery of the world. It
has created tapestries and brocades for castle and palace, and invented
cheap substitutes for these costly products, so that the smallest and
poorest house as well as the richest can cover its walls with something
pleasant to the eye and suggestive to the mind.

[Illustration: LARGE SITTING-ROOM IN "STAR ROCK" COUNTRY HOUSE]

It is one of the privileges and opportunities of art to invent these
disguises; and to do it so thoroughly and successfully as to content us
with facts which would otherwise be disagreeable. And we do, by these
various devices, make our walls so hospitable to our thoughts that we
take positive and continual pleasure in them.

We do this chiefly, perhaps, by ministering to our instinctive love of
colour; which to many temperaments is like food to the hungry, and
satisfies as insistent a demand of the mind as food to the body.

At this late period of the world we are the inheritors of many methods
of wall disguise, from the primitive weavings or blanket coverings with
which nomadic peoples lined the walls of their tents, or the arras which
in later days covered the roughness and rudeness of the stone walls of
kings and barons, to the pictured tapestries of later centuries. This
latter achievement of art manufacture has outlived and far outweighed
the others in value, because it more perfectly performs the object of
its creation.

Tapestries, for the most part, offer us a semblance of nature, and cheat
us with a sense of unlimit