vl AMERICAN HOMES AND GARDENS 
October, 1912 
The horizon of vision, the circle 
which bounds our sight, has not 
changed. 
It is best observed at sea. Though 
the ships of today are larger than the 
ships of fifty years ago, you cannot . 
see them until they come up over the 
edge of the world, fifteen or twenty 
miles away. 
A generation ago the horizon of 
speech was very limited. When your 
grandfather was a young man, his 
voice could be heard on a still day for 
perhaps a mile. Even though he used 
a speaking trumpet, he could not be 
heard nearly so far as he could be seen. 
Today all this has been changed. 
The telephone has vastly extended 
the horizon of speech. 
Your Telephone Horizon 
Talking two thousand miles is an 
everyday occurrence, while in order 
to see this distance, you would need 
to mount your telescope on a platform 
approximately 560 miles high. 
As amanis followed by his shadow, 
so is he followed by the horizon of 
telephone communication. When he 
travels across the continent his tele- 
phone horizon travels with him, and 
wherever he may be he is always at 
the center of a great circle of telephone 
neighbors. 
What is true of one man is true of 
the whole public. In order to provide 
a telephone horizon for each member 
of the nation, the Bell System has 
been established. 
AMERICAN TELEPHONE AND TELEGRAPH COMPANY 
AND ASSOCIATED COMPANIES 
Every Bell Telephone is the Center of the System. 
morocco leather case for only $10. 
if Machine does not make good. 
HESS sai LOCKER 
The Only Modern, Sanitary 
STEEL Medicine Cabinet 
or locker finished in snow-white, baked 
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Beautiful beveled mirror door. Nickel 
plate brass trimmings. Steel or glass 
shelves. 
Costs Less Than Wood 
Never warps, shrinks, nor swells. Dust 
and vermin proof, easily cleaned. 
Should Be In Every Bathroom 
Four styles—four sizes. To recess in 
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aikest fae §=6trated circular. 
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Medicine Cabinet Makers of Steel Furnaces.—Free Booklet 
The “GOLDEN GEM” ADDING MACHINE $ 1 O 
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SALES AGENTS: The ‘‘Golden Gem’ Sells Itself 
M ~— Iron Railings, Wire Fences and Entrance 
= Gates of all designs and for all purposes. 
| Correspondence solicited: Catalogs furnished. 
FENCE! 
Tennis Court Enclosures, Unclimbable Wire Mesh 
and Spiral Netting (Chain Link) Fences for Estate 
Boundaries and Industrial Properties—Lawn Fumi- 
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253 Broadway 
F.E. CARPENTER CO., Now York City 
CHINESE BLACKWOOD FURNITURE 
CHARACTERISTIC: productos 
China, known around the world and 
admired in varying degrees by foreigners 
generally is Chinese blackwood furniture, 
~ mmonly including cabinets, chairs, stools, 
stands, pedestals, center and side tables, 
frames, and most other drawing-room 
pieces, elaborately carved and decorated 
and manufactured or supposed to be made 
from a blackwood, writes Consul General 
George E. Anderson at Hongkong to the 
United States Daily Consular and Trade 
Reports. This furniture, if real in all re- 
spects, 1s produced from various dark 
woods, generally from Dalbergia latifolia, 
a hard, heavy, close-grained, dark-red wood 
known to the Chinese as “ka-hee” or “fur- 
niture wood,” or sometimes as “sun-gee” or 
“dark-red wood.’ When exposed to the 
air for a long time this wood turns dark 
and eventually becomes black, with more or 
less red streaks in the grain corresponding 
to the amount of resinous or other natural 
coloring matter in the grain. It is imported 
as logs of as much as 18 inches in diameter 
and up to perhaps 20 feet in length, but also 
as tree branches and smaller pieces, the 
Chinese affecting pieces grown crooked for 
use in natural shape in some of their fur- 
niture. The wood is bought by weight, an 
average wholesale consignment costing 3 to 
4 taels a picul or about 11% to 2 cents gold 
per pound. 
Originally the Chinese used this wood for 
their own fine furniture and for wood bases 
or frames for porcelains, jade carvings, or 
other ornaments for display in drawing- 
rooms or cabinets. Chinese furniture or- 
dinarily is quite plain, generally constructed 
in long curves or rounded corners, straight 
backs to the chairs, settees with straight 
backs, often set with porcelain or marble 
panels, and similar pieces, while bases for 
porcelains or other similar work were often 
beautifully carved. With the advent of 
foreigners in South China, however, there 
came a demand for a combination of fur- 
niture more or less on the Chinese model, 
which was carved instead of plain. The 
Chinese manufacturers eventually designed 
furniture somewhat on foreign models, with 
the popular elaborate carved ornamentation, 
the local demand for which spread into a 
world-wide trade. The actual volume of 
this trade is not large, the United States 
probably taking more of it than any other 
nation. Sales to the United States will 
probably not run over $50,000 a year, in- 
cluding shipments of household goods. 
The furniture is prominently displayed 
in oriental shops all over the world, and is 
so especially characteristic of Hongkong 
and South China that there is unusual in- 
terest in it, and one of the first visits paid 
by tourists traveling in this part of the 
world is to blackwood shops and factories. 
Furniture of this wood is often referred 
to in the United States as teak furniture. 
Blackwood has ho relation to teakwood and 
is distinctly different from it in nature and 
characteristics. Formerly most of this fur- 
niture was made in Canton, which still an- 
nually exports about $45,000 gold in value, 
practically all to Hongkong, besides various 
amounts shipped abroad as household fur- 
niture. In Canton, a district practically 
given over to making such furniture is a 
point of interest for tourists. Of late years 
these factories have sprung up in Hongkong 
where most of the product is actually sold 
to users and there are now eight such 
establishments listed by the Government. 
A few years ago there was considerable 
fraud in the business and soft light woods 
stained black were used in such goods just 
as most of the so-called cherry wood furni- 
