nels were scaled from a room in a Venetian
palace, carved when the art and the fortunes of that sea-city were at
their best, and the alternately repeating squares of the ceiling were
fashioned to carry out and supplement the ancient carvings. If this were
a small room, there would be a sense of unrest in so lavish a use of
broken surface, but in one large enough to have it felt as a whole, and
not in detail, it simply gives a quality of preciousness. The soft
browns of the wood spread a mystery of surface, from the edge of the
polished floor until it meets a frieze of painted canvas filled with
large reclining figures clad in draperies of red, and blue, and
yellow--separating the walls from the ceiling by an illumination of
colour. This colour-decoration belongs to the past, and it is a question
if any modern painting could have adapted itself so perfectly to the
spirit of the room, although in itself it might be far more beautiful.
It is a bit of antique imagination, its cherub-borne plates of fruit,
and golden flagons, and brown-green of foliage and turquoise of sky, and
crimson and gold of garments, all softened to meet the shadows of the
room. The door-spaces in the wainscot are hung with draperies of crimson
velvet, the surface frayed and flattened by time into variations of red,
impossible to newer weavings, while the great floor-space is spread with
an enormous rug of the same colour--the gift of a Sultan. A carved table
stands in the centre, surrounded with high-backed carved chairs, the
seats covered with the same antique velvet which shows in the
portieres. A fall of thin crimson silk tints the sides of the
window-frame, and on the two ends of the broad step or platform which
leads to the window stand two tall pedestals and globe-shaped jars of
red and blue-green pottery. The deep, ruby-like red of the one and the
mixed indefinite tint of the other seem to have curdled into the exact
shade for each particular spot, their fitness is so perfect.

The very sufficient knowledge which has gone to the making of this
superb room has kept the draperies unbroken by design or device, giving
colour only and leaving to the carved walls the privilege of ornament.

It will be seen that there are but two noticeable colour-tones in the
room--brown with infinite variations, and red in rugs and draperies.

There is no real affinity between these two tints, but they are here so
well balanced in mass, that the two form a complet