e each seem to claim their own in the
mixed and softened background of the wall.

The colour of the room would hardly be complete without the three
beautiful portraits which hang upon the walls, and suggest their part of
the life and conversation of to-day so that it stands on a proper plane
with the dignity of three generations. The beautiful mahogany doors and
elaboration of cornice and central ornament belong to them, but the
harmony and beauty of colour are of our own time and tell of the general
knowledge and feeling for art which belongs to it.

I have given the colour-treatment only of this room, leaving out the
effect of carved teak-wood furniture and subtleties of china and
glass--not alone as an instance of colour in a sunny exposure, but as an
example of fitting new styles to old, of keeping what is valuable and
beautiful in itself and making it a part of the comparatively new art of
decoration.

[Illustration: SCREEN BY DORA WHEELER KEITH SCREEN AND GLASS WINDOW IN
HOUSE AT LAKEWOOD (Belonging to Clarence Roof, Esq.)]

There is a dining-room in one of the many delightful houses in
Lakewood, N.J., which owes its unique charm to a combination of
position, light, colour, and perhaps more than all, to the clever
decoration of its upper walls, which is a fine and broad composition of
swans and many-coloured clusters of grapes and vine-foliage placed above
the softly tinted copper-coloured wall. The same design is carried in
silvery and gold-coloured leaded-glass across the top of the wide west
window, as shown in illustration opposite page 222, and reappears with a
shield-shaped arrangement of wings in a beautiful four-leaved screen.

The notable and enjoyable colour of the room is seen from the very
entrance of the house, the broad main hall making a carpeted highway to
the wide opening of the room, where a sheaf of tinted sunset light seems
to spread itself like a many-doubled fan against the shadows of the
hall.

All the ranges and intervals, the lights, reflections, and darks
possible to that most beautiful of metals--copper--seem to be gathered
into the frieze and screen, and melt softly into the greens of the
foliage, or tint the plumage of the swans. It is an instance of the kind
of decoration which is both classic and domestic, and being warmed and
vivified by beautiful colour, appeals both to the senses and the
imagination.

It would be easy to multiply instances of beautiful rooms, and each one