of our own day are to be
encouraged and fostered--but we can buy the best of the things which
are made in our time, the best in style, in intention, in fittingness,
and above all in carefulness and honesty of construction.

For some reason the quality of durability seems to be wanting in modern
furniture. Our things are fashioned of the same woods, but something in
the curing or preparation of them has weakened the fibre and made it
brittle. Probably the gradual evaporation of the tree-juices which
old-time cabinet-makers were willing to wait for, left the shrunken
sinews of the wood in better condition than is possible with our hurried
and violent kiln-dried methods. What is gained in time in the one place
is lost in another. Nature refuses to enter into our race for speedy
completion, and if we hurry her natural processes we shorten our lease
of ownership.

As a very apt illustration of this fact, I remember coming into
possession some twenty years ago of an oak chair which had stood,
perhaps, for more than two hundred years in a Long Island farm-house.
When I found it, it had been long relegated to kitchen use and was
covered with a crust of variously coloured paints which had accumulated
during the two centuries of its existence. The fashion of it was rare,
and had probably been evolved by some early American cabinet-maker, for
while it had all and even more than the grace of the high-backed
Chippendale patterns, it was better fitted to the rounded surfaces of
the human body. It was a spindle chair with a slightly hollowed seat,
the rim of the back rounded to a loop which was continued into
arm-rests, which spread into thickened blades for hand-rests. Being very
much in love with the grace and ease of it, I took it to a manufacturer
to be reproduced in mahogany, who, with a far-sighted sagacity, flooded
the market with that particular pattern.

We are used--and with good reason--to consider mahogany as a durable
wood, but of the half-dozen of mahogany copies of the old oak chair,
each one has suffered some break of legs or arms or spindles, while the
original remains as firm in its withered old age as it was the day I
rescued it from the "out-kitchen" of the Long Island farm-house.

For the next fifty years after the close of our colonial history, the
colonial cabinet-makers in New England and the northern Middle States
continued to flourish, evolving an occasional good variation from what
may be called colonia