linen or some special
nursery design in cretonne should hang to the sill.

The colors in both day and night nurseries should be soft and cheerful,
and the color scheme as carefully thought out as for the rest of the
house. Both rooms should be on the sunny side of the house, and far
enough away from the family living-room to avoid any one's being
disturbed when armies charge up and down the play-room battle-ground or
Indians start out on the warpath.

The best floor covering for a day nursery is plain linoleum, as it is
not dangerously slippery and is easily kept clean. If the floor is hard
wood, it must not have a slippery wax finish. It will also save tumbles
if the day nursery has no rugs, but the night nursery ought to have one
large one or several small ones by the beds and in front of the open
fire. Washable cotton rugs are best to use for this purpose.

When children are very small, it is necessary to have sides to the beds
to keep them from falling out. The beds should be placed so that the
light does not shine directly in the children's eyes in the morning, and
there should be plenty of fresh air. The rest of the night nursery
furniture should consist of a dressing-table, a chest of drawers, a
night table and some chairs. There should be a few pictures on the walls
hung low, and beautiful and interesting in subjects and treatment. The
fire should be well screened.

Pictures like the "Songs of Childhood," for instance, would be charming
simply framed. If there is only one nursery for both day and night use,
the room should be decorated as a day nursery and the bed-cover made of
white dimity with a border of the curtain stuff or made entirely of it.

_Curtains_

The modern window, with its huge panes of glass and simple framework,
makes an insistent demand for curtains. Without curtains windows of this
kind give a blank, staring appearance to the room and also a sense of
insecurity in having so many holes in the walls. The beautiful windows
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Italy, England and
France, give no such feeling of incompleteness, for their well-carved
frames, and over-windows, and their small panes of glass, were important
parts of the decorative scheme. Windows and doors were more than mere
openings in those days, but things have changed, and the hard lines of
our perfectly useful windows get on our nerves if we do not soften them
with drapery. In that hopeless time in the la