of
wood, are covered with tapestry, others with green satin, sometimes
ornamented with floral devices made of puffed satin, overlaid and
outlined with gold thread. Medicine chests varied in size, but few
households were "furnished" without a fitting receptacle for home-made
recipes for simple ailments, such as were much resorted to in the past.
The chests were usually well fitted with bottles and phials, and with
glass stoppers or silver or pewter tops. Many of the medicines had been
prescribed by local practitioners, and were regarded as sovereign
remedies to be used on all occasions; others were family recipes held in
high repute. In such chests there was often a drawer or compartment
containing bleeding cups and lancet--a remedy often resorted to when an
illness could not be diagnosed.

Old Lacquer.

The beautiful red lacquer work is getting scarce, although it has had a
long run, for it is more than twelve hundred years since the Japanese
learned the secret of making it from the Coreans, who in their turn had
it from the Chinese. The secret of producing in China and Japan lacquer
which cannot be imitated in other countries lies in the _rhus
vernificifera_ which flourishes in those localities. It is the gum of
that tree commonly called the lacquer-tree, which when taken fresh and
applied to the object it is intended to lacquer turns jet-black on
exposure to the sun, drying with great hardness. It will thus be seen
that although French and English lacquers have been very popular, the
imitation lacquer applied can have neither the effect nor the durability
of the natural gum which sets so hard, and in the larger and more
important objects can be applied again and again until quite a depth of
lacquer is obtained, sometimes encrusted over with jewels and other
materials embedded in it.

The best English lacquer was made in this country between the years 1670
and 1710, and was a very successful imitation of the Oriental. At that
time and during the following century very many tea caddies, trays,
screens, trinket boxes, and even furniture, were imported; and it was
those which English workmen copied, gradually increasing the variety of
household goods for which that material was so suitable.

[Illustration: FIG. 94.--OLD POWDER FLASKS.

(_In the Victoria and Albert Museum._)]

Old English lacquer differed from the more modern papier-mache in that
instead of the pulp being composed entirely of paper, glued togethe