Page:Every Woman's Encyclopedia Volume 1.djvu/180

 WOMAN'S HOME 15S suitable for the purpose, may go anywhere you Hke. There is one point, however, to be insisted on, that coats and wraps are to be hung up somewhere out of sight ; a cupboard must be contrived, and from a hall that is used as a living-room, even hats must be banished. A dog-grate, big enough to hold logs of wood, adds immensely to its cheeri- ness, so do sporting prints and foxs' heads, with such weapons as the men of the house have brought home from their travels, or the women glean. Some people hang oil-paintings in a hall, just as they will put exquisite' water-colours on a paper swearing loudly in all the primi- tive colours, and hang a Murillo beside a line engrav- ing in a bed- room. While it is true that a large picture in oils above a vast open fireplace in a great house has the best pos- sible effect, and the same holds good with dining- room and library, still, for the ordinary hall there is nothing to beat good etchings and good sporting prints. For the people who buy a picture because it is " pretty " — and it is the pretty- pretty in taste even more than the down- right hideous that reduces one t o despair and hang it up where the spirit moves them, in the hall or elsewhere, I do not write ; it requires the training of a lifetime to buy the right pictures — pictures you can live with — and to learn where and how to hang them. Probably more houses are ruined by a miscellaneous collection of oils, water-colours, and prints than from any other reason — bare walls with the simplest paper, if all of one colour, are beautiful, austere, but before the " splattered " expanse one sits weeping or anathematising, according to one's tempera- ment, longing to haul them all down, to sort, to banish most — sometimes all. For I must again, and yet again, assert that there is no ugly house, big or small, that could not by sorting, ehminating, adding to in places, and rearranging generally, be made comfortable and even delightful to live in. In speaking of halls, one must not lose sight of the all-prevailing flats that have, alas, sounded the knell of famihes, for when you have to choose between a guest-chamber and a nursery, what becomes of the poor baby ? Roosevelt answers " Where ? " When the hall is of negUgible proportions there is seldom more than room for a table, a hat and coat stand (that, hke the lady whose figure had faults on both sides, achieves neither com- fort nor ele- gance), a chair or two, and that is all. In this case the first thing to do is to decide on the colour of lobby and corridor. If you are well off for engrav- ings, black woodwork above and below, a blue- grey paper, and dark slate-blue linoleum o r carpet and mats to match, will not at any rate show want of taste, or discount the blue, pink, or green rooms opening off, and that in- variably (for in flat -life there is no privacy, and Even a moderately wide passage can be made into an effective hall if taste is displayed -^hat WOUld in the arrangement of engravings, and a few good pieces of furniture v • j j, be indecent in a house is Nature in a flat) have their doors flung wide open. Remember that you cannot make a note of vivid colour as effective in the hall of a flat as a house, because there is no staircase ascending before you, when the quality and colour of the stair-carpeting arrest your attention, and a dead level does not at any time make for beauty. When we were told to hft up our eyes unto the hills there was more than one sound reason behind that advice, for the eye being carried up and on, instead of depressed and lowered, causes a profound feehng of delight, and teaches its lesson