eplace instead of the portrait. The
dining-table and chairs might give place to good reproductions of
Chippendale, and the marble console to a carpenter-made one painted to
match the woodwork.

The subject of proper furniture for a dining-room is usually settled by
the house mistress before her wedding bouquet has faded, so I shall only
touch on the out-of-ordinary things here. Everyone knows that a table
and a certain number of chairs and a sideboard of some kind "go
together." The trouble is that everyone knows these things _too_ well,
and dining-room conventions are so binding that we miss many pleasant
departures from the usual.

My own dining-room in New York is anything but usual, and yet there is
nothing undignified about it. The room was practically square, so that
it had a certain orderly quality to begin with. The rooms of the house
are all rather small, and so to gain the greatest possible space I have
the door openings at the extreme end of the wall, leaving as large a
wall space as possible. You enter this room, then, through a door at the
extreme left of the south wall of the room. Another door at the extreme
right of the same wall leads to a private passage. The space left
between the doors is thereby conserved, and is broken into a large
central panel flanked by two narrow panels. The space above the doors is
also paneled. This wall is broken by a console placed under the central
panel. Above it one of the Mennoyer originals, which you may remember in
the Washington Irving dining-room, is set in the wall, framed with a
narrow molding of gray. The walls and woodwork of the room are of
exactly the same tone of gray--darker than a silver gray and lighter
than pewter. Everything, color, balance, proportion, objects of art, has
been uniformly considered.

Continuing, the east wall is broken in the center by the fireplace, with
a mantel of white and gray marble. A large mirror, surmounted with a
bas-relief in black and white, fills the space between mantel shelf and
cornice. This mirror and bas-relief are framed with the narrow carved
molding painted gray. Here again there is the beauty of balance: two
Italian candlesticks of carved and gilded wood flank a marble bust on
the mantel shelf. There is nothing more. On the right of the mirror, in
a narrow panel, there is a wall clock of carved and gilded wood which
also takes its place as a part of the wall, and keeps it.

The north wall is broken by two mirror