ese old designs exemplify the elementary
essentials of furniture--good materials, gracefulness, and thorough
workmanship. These are qualities that are to be sought for the cottage
as well as for the mansion; and while they may add to the purchase cost
of the separate articles, it is possible to secure them at no great
increase for the whole over the cheaper goods, provided we guard
against the common error in housefurnishing--overpurchasing.

[Illustration: Good examples of Chippendale and old walnut.]

THE ARTS AND CRAFTS

What is known in America as the arts and crafts movement has, in its
sincere developments, sought to adapt the better qualities of the old
designs of furniture to the demands of modern conditions, artistic and
practical. Not always, however, has it been possible to distinguish
between the honest effort to enforce a better standard and the various
forms of charlatanry under which clumsy and unsightly creations have
been and are being worked off upon an ingenuous public at prices
proportioned to their degrees of ugliness. In colonial times many an
humble carpenter vainly scratched his noggin as he puzzled over the
hopeless problem of duplicating with rude tools and scant skill the
handiwork that graced the lordly mansions of merrie England; to-day
some wight who can scarcely distinguish a jackplane from a saw-buck
essays to "express himself" (at our expense) in furniture, repeating
all the gaucheries that the colonial carpenter could not avoid making.

MISSION FURNITURE

Others have set themselves to reproducing the so-called mission
furniture which the good priests of early California would have
rejoiced to exchange for the convenient modern furniture at which the
faddist sniffs. But most of us who stop to think, realize that there
is no magic virtue in antiquity of itself. The average man, at least,
cannot delude himself into the belief that there is comfort to be found
in a great deal of the harsh-angled stuff paraded as artistic.

Let us not be understood, however, as hinting that artistic qualities
must be disregarded. Though furniture should not be chosen for its
beauty or associations alone, it must not be considered at all if
beauty is absent.

COMFORT, AESTHETIC AND PHYSICAL

The first consideration of the home is comfort. Let no one dispute
that fact. But there is such a thing as being aesthetically as well as
physically comfortable. Conceptions of physical comfo