e for
winter, and cool in summer. No one has a parlor now-a-days. The best
room is generally a living room for the whole family. No more do we see
enlarged pictures which good taste demands should be placed in bedrooms
and private sitting rooms. The ten-cent stores have done a great deal of
good in educating the poor, white and black alike. These stores have
everywhere sold small brown art prints of many of the great paintings,
to take the place of the gaudy dust-laden chromos and family pictures.

Pictures are hung low that they may be thoroughly dusted, as well as to
give a near view of the subject.

Expensive carpets are also things of the past. Painted and stained
floors with light weight rugs are more generally used. These may be
cleaned and handled without giving the backache to women. Many colored
girls boast of having painted their own floors and woodwork. Much of
this has been learned in the boarding school.

A tawdry home expresses its mistress as do her clothes. Next to the
kitchen a fully equipped bath room is now the most important room in the
house. Health and sanitation are the topics of the hour and a colored
girl should know how to put a washer on a faucet as well as her father
or brother.

A house without books is indeed an unfurnished home. Good books are the
fad now. They are everywhere in evidence in the up-to-date colored home.
They are exhibited almost as hand-painted china was. In every inventory
or collection one finds a Bible, a dictionary, and an atlas.

The times are changing and the colored people are changing with the
times. Cleanliness and health are the watchwords, and "Order" is
Heaven's first law.

THE KNIGHTING OF DONALD

LILLIAN B. WITTEN

"With spear drawn Sir Cedric rode steadily through the forest, while
ever nearer and nearer came the dragon. Swift and sudden was the
onslaught and great was the struggle, until finally Sir Cedric
dismounted from his black charger and stood victor over the huge monster
who had committed so many depredations against the country side."

Slowly and lingeringly Donald closed the book. The many-branched tree
under which he lay changed into a grey stone castle with moat and
drawbridge upon which through the day armored knights on prancing steeds
rode from castle to village, always on missions of good to the towns and
hamlets. Never did Donald tire of reading about Arthur, Galahad, Merlin
and the others, but Launcelot, the Bold, was his