and that any one who has this faculty is amply qualified for "taking up
house-decoration." Indeed, natural facility succeeds in satisfying many
personal cravings for beauty, although it is not competent for general
practice.

Of course there are people, and many of them, who are gifted with an
inherent sense of balance and arrangement, and a true eye for colour,
and--given the same materials--such people will make a room pleasant and
cozy, where one without these gifts would make it positively ugly. In so
far, then, individual gifts are a great advantage, yet one possessing
them in even an unusual degree may make great mistakes in decoration.
What _not_ to do, in this day of almost universal experiment, is perhaps
the most valuable lesson to the untrained decorator. Many of the rocks
upon which he splits are down in no chart, and lie in the track of what
seems to him perfectly plain sailing.

There are houses of fine and noble exterior which are vulgarized by
uneducated experiments in colour and ornament, and belittled by being
filled with heterogeneous collections of unimportant art. Yet these very
instances serve to emphasize the demand for beautiful surroundings, and
in spite of mistakes and incongruities, must be reckoned as efforts
toward a desirable end.

In spite of a prevalent want of training, it is astonishing how much we
have of good interior decoration, not only in houses of great
importance, but in those of people of average fortunes--indeed, it is in
the latter that we get the general value of the art.

This comparative excellence is to be referred to the very general
acquirement of what we call "art cultivation" among American women, and