dressing-room; but you are not called upon to remember every servant in attendance.

Fees to railway porters and others are certainly not required by the rules of etiquette to be paid. The payment of them is indeed forbidden by many of the railway companies; but the receiving of them is winked at, the result being that travelers who want attendance are, for the most part, obliged to pay for it. The system is, however, a pernicious one, and travelers should discourage it as much as possible, if only for the sake of those who cannot afford to sustain it.

It is generally wise and right, after a due experience of the principles and intentions of servants, to place confidence in their honesty, and to let them have the comfort of knowing that you do so. At the same time never cease to exercise a system of supervision. The great principle of housekeeping is regularity, and without this (one of the most difficult of the minor virtues to practice), all efforts to promote order must be ineffectual.

In this country, servants are proverbially more troublesome than in Europe, where service is often transmitted through generations in one family. Here, the housekeeper is obliged to change often, taking frequently the most ignorant of the lower classes of foreigners to train into good and useful servants, only to have them become dissatisfied as soon as they become acquainted with others, who instil the republican doctrine of perfect equality into their

minds, ruining them for good servants. There are some points of etiquette, however, upon which every lady should insist :

Never allow a servant to keep people waiting upon the door-step.

Never allow servants to treat any one disrespectfully.

Never allow servants to turn their own proper duties over to the children or other servants by a bribe. Many fond parents would be amazed if they knew how much running and actual work was performed by little Nellie or Charlie, and how many fits of mysterious indigestion were caused by the rich cake, candy, or half-ripe fruit that paid for the service and bribed the silence.

Never allow a servant to keep a visitor standing parleying on the door-step, while she holds the door ajar. Train the door-servant to admit any caller promptly, show them to the parlor, bring up their cards at once, and return with your answer or message.

CHAPTER XXVII.

HOME DECORATION.

T

FLOWERS.

HERE is nothing cheaper, there is nothing more beautiful, there is nothing that makes

a house more cheerful than flowers. They are ready and willing to smile in beauty and loveliness on all who will cultivate their acquaintance and give them hospitality. Here is an example which will cost very little besides the labor :

Take an old tin pan condemned to the retired list by reason of holes in the bottom, get twentyfive cents' worth of green paint for this and other purposes, and paint it. The holes in the bottom are a recommendation for its new service. If there are no holes, you must drill two or three, as drainage is essential. Now put a layer one inch deep of broken charcoal and potsherds over the bottom, and then soil, in the following proportions:

Two-fourths wood-soil, such as you find in forests, under trees.

One-fourth clean sand.

One-fourth meadow-soil, taken from under fresh turf. Mix with this some charcoal dust.

In this soil plant all sorts of ferns, together with some few swamp-grasses; and around the edge put a border of money-plant or periwinkle to hang over. This will need to be watered once or twice a week, and it will grow and thrive all summer long in a corner of your room. Should you prefer, you can suspend it by wires and make a hanging-basket. Ferns and wood-grasses need not have sunshinethey grow well in shadowy places.

On this same principle you can convert a salt-box or an old drum of figs into a hanging-basket. Tack bark and pine-cones and moss upon the outside of it, drill holes and pass wires through it, and you have a woodland hanging-basket, which will hang and grow any corner of your house.

in

We have been into rooms which, by the simple disposition of articles of this kind, have been made to have an air so poetical and attractive that they seemed more like a nymph's cave than anything in the real world.

Another mode of disposing of ferns is this: Take a flat piece of board sawed out something like a shield, with a hole at the top for hanging it up.

Upon the board nail a wire-pocket made of an oxmuzzle flattened on one side; or make something of the kind with stiff wire. Line this with a sheet of close moss, which appears green behind the wire network. Then you fill it with loose, spongy moss, such

as you find in swamps, and plant therein great plumes of fern and various swamp-grasses; they will continue to grow there, and hang gracefully over. When watering, set a pail under for it to drip into. It needs only to keep this moss always damp, and to sprinkle these ferns occasionally with a whisk-broom, to have a most lovely ornament for your room or hall.

The use of ivy in decorating a room is beginning to be generally acknowledged. It needs to be planted in the kind of soil we have described, in a welldrained pot or box, and to have its leaves thoroughly washed once or twice a year in strong suds made with soft soap, to free it from dust and scale-bug : and an ivy will live and thrive and wind about in a room, year in and year out, will grow around pictures, and do almost anything to oblige you that you can suggest to it.

Pretty brackets can be made of common pine, ornamented with odd-growing twigs or mosses or roots, scraped and varnished, or in their native state.

A beautiful ornament for a room with pictures is German ivy. Slips of this will start without roots in bottles of water. Slide the bottle behind the picture, and the ivy will seem to come from fairyland, and hang its verdure in all manner of pretty curves around the picture. It may then be trained to travel toward other ivy, and thus aid in forming green cornice along the ceiling. We have seen some rooms that had an ivy cornice around the whole, giving the air of a leafy bower.