o count the designs or should “make faces at you.” Rather let it be all of one soft tint, a pearly gray, a tender sea-shell pink, or a green which has no arsenic in it; but on this point great care is requisite. You should also make it your business to see, with your own eyes, that your new paper, whatever its pattern or price, is not hung over the old one, and that the walls have been thoroughly stripped, and washed, and dried again before it is put on.

Bedroom walls, covered with chintz, stretched tightly in panels, are exceedingly clean and pretty, but they must be arranged so as to allow of being easily taken down and cleaned. The prettiest walls I ever saw thus covered, were made of chintz, with a creamy background and tendrils of ivy of half a dozen shades of green and brown artfully blended, streaming down in graceful garlands and sprays towards a dado about four feet from the ground. It was a lofty room, and the curtains, screens, &c., were made to match, of chintz, with sprays of ivy, and a similar border. I know other bedroom walls where fluted white muslin is stretched over pink or blue silk (prettiest of all over an apple-green batiste). I dislike tapestry[Pg 10] extremely for bedroom walls; the designs are generally of a grim and ghostly nature, and even if they represent simpering shepherds and shepherdesses, they are equally tiresome. There is a Japanese paper, sometimes used for curtains, which really looks more suitable and pretty when serving as wall-hangings in the bedrooms of a country house. I know a whole wing of “bachelors’ quarters” papered by fluted Japanese curtains, and they are exceedingly pretty. The curtains of these rooms are of workhouse sheeting lined and bordered with Turkey red, and leave nothing to be desired for quaint simplicity and brightness. I must ease my mind by declaring here that I have a strong prejudice agai