best--it grows out of so many considerations.

The main thing to remember, when you begin to cover your walls, is that
they are walls, that they are straight up and down, and have breadth and
thickness, that they are supposedly strong, in other words, that they
are a structural part of your house. A wall should always be treated as
a flat surface and in a conventional way. Pictorial flowers and lifelike
figures have no place upon it, but conventionalized designs may be used
successfully--witness the delighted use of the fantastic landscape
papers in the middle of the Eighteenth Century. Walls should always be
obviously _walls_, and not flimsy partitions hung with gauds and
trophies. The wall is the background of the room, and so must be flat in
treatment and reposeful in tone.

Walls have always offered tempting spaces for decoration. Our ancestors
hung their walls with trophies. Our pioneer of to-day may live in an
adobe hut, but he hangs his walls with things that suggest beauty and
color to him, calendars, and trophies and gaudy chromos. The rest of his
hut he uses for the hard business of living, but his walls are his
theater, his literature, his recreation. The wolf skin will one day give
place to a painting of the chase, the gaudy calendars to better things,
when prosperity comes. But now these crude things speak for the pioneer
period of the man, and therefore they are the right things for the
moment. How absurd would be the refined etching and the delicate
water-color on these clay walls, even were they within his grasp!

The first impulse of all of us is to hang the things we admire on our
walls. Unfortunately, we do not always select papers and fabrics and
pictures we will continue to admire. Who doesn't know the woman who goes
to a shop and selects wall papers as she would select her gowns, because