The long oak table that is so comfortably ample for
books and magazines and flowers in your living-room may be copied from
an old refectory table--but what of it? It fulfils its new mission just
as frankly as the original table served the monks who used it.

The soft brown of oak is a pleasure after the over-polished mahogany of
a thousand rooms. I do not wish to condemn Colonial mahogany furniture,
you understand. I simply wish to remind you that there are other woods
and models available. French furniture of the best type represents the
supreme art of the cabinet-maker, and is incomparable for formal rooms,
but I am afraid the time will never come when French furniture will be
interchangeable with the oak and mahogany of England and America.

In short, the whole thing should be a matter of taste and suitability.
If you have a few fine old things that have come to you from your
ancestors--a grandfather's clock, an old portrait or two--you are quite
justified in bringing good reproductions of similar things into your
home. The effect is the thing you are after, isn't it? Then, too, you
will escape the awful fever that makes any antique seem desirable, and
in buying reproductions you can select really comfortable furniture. You
will be independent of the dreadful vases and candelabra and steel
engravings "of the period," and will feel free to use modern prints and
Chinese porcelains and willow chairs and anything that fits into your
home. I can think of no slavery more deadly to one's sense of humor than
collecting antiques indiscriminately!

[Illustration: THE TRELLIS ROOM IN THE COLONY CLUB]

XVIII

THE ART OF TRELLIAGE

When I planned the trellis room of the Colony Club in New York I had
hard work finding workmen who could appreciate the importance of
crossing and recrossing little strips of green wood, of arranging them
to form a mural decoration architectural in treatment. This trellis room
was, I believe, the first in America to be so considered, though the use
of trellis is as old as architecture in Japan, China, Arabia, Egypt,
Italy, France and Spain.

The earliest examples of trellis work shown are in certain Roman
frescoes. In Pompeii the mural paintings give us a very good idea of
what some of the Roman gardens were like. In the entrance hall of the
house of Sallust is represented a garden with trellised niches and
bubbling fountains. Representations that have come down to us in
documents show