IV.-FLORAL.

THIS is such a very obvious way of decorating a room that I need say very little about it. At least eleven out of every dozen rooms one sees are decorated in this manner. The only advice to be given is simple in the extreme: avoid too many colours and choose suitable flowers. Double flowers do not recommend themselves for designs the beauty of which consists in graceful outline, and to which the crown of stamens usually found in single flowers adds so great an interest. When one remembers the blobby roses of a staring magenta colour that one suffered from for so many years, one is willing to forego even the queen of flowers-or rather have her as Nature made her growing round the windows, or forming the chief attraction of a stand of flowers. Single roses leave nothing to be desired in form or colour; but they have been so fatally hackneyed as "crewel patterns," that I imagine it would be utterly impossible to make a really original design of them now. There are, however, hundreds of lovely flowers, growing by every roadside, on our commons and beside our rivers, which are eminently suited for decorative purposes,

and which are never apparently made use of at all. Wall-papers, Christmas cards, and crewel patterns, all keep religiously to their well-known and strictly limited botanical range. Rose-campions, wild geraniums, stitchworts and the silver-weed, though as commonly to be met with as dog-roses and primroses, seem to have been wholly overlooked. There are hundreds of cultivated flowers that have met with the same fate.

I should strongly advise any one who is sufficiently artistic to draw his own designs, to choose also his own flowers, and to be guided by his own idea of beauty and fitness, and not by the passing fashion of the day. Fashion is a word that suggests a latent vulgarity, and fashion in flowers is a vulgar as well as a ridiculous idea. To hear a flower so perfectly lovely as the lily patronized by its languid admirers provokes a feeling of impatience in many minds; there seems to be a tacit assumption that the beauty of the lily has just been discovered-and by themignoring even the Divine allusion to the lilies of the field made so many centuries ago, and in words as beautiful and as exquisite as the lilies themselves. We may take it for granted that lilies were not created in order to give a few thrills of bliss to people at the end of the nineteenth century; and also that they will continue in their tranquil beauty ages after we are gone. Even flowers not gene

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