AMERICAN 
430 
na i 
‘Lhe front of the house at St. Martins, with its commodious upper and 
lower pillared porch, suggests architecture of the Southern plantation type 
down, supplied this part of the fabric. The practice of 
despoiling old houses of their woodwork, or of anything 
else they may contain, cannot be too heartily deprecated 
or too severely condemned but, when a building is actually 
in the hands of the wreckers, it is surely the part of wisdom 
to save the good things. ‘To the right, a wide doorway 
opens into the reception-room—a business-like apartment, 
quite large enough for seeing such folk as one does not wish 
to urge to prolong their visits. From the reception-room 
a door admits to the library, whose big southern windows 
look out upon the garden. One commendable feature about 
the library is that it can be shut off entirely from the rest 
of the house and guarded against intrusion—likewise the 
onslaught of well-meaning, but misguided housemaids, in 
whose eyes books and papers are fair game for duster and 
besom rather than the things that really do need cleaning. 
Passing on through the reception-room as an antecham- 
ber we go through a wide, generous doorway, down three 
low steps, into the living-room—the very heart and center 
of the family life and, as it should be, the pleasantest place 
in the house. The delicately spindled bannisters at the side 
of these steps make one of the most characteristic touches 
of an uncommonly interesting room. ‘The mere act of de- 
scending into the atmosphere of genial cheer gives one the 
feeling of settling down into a comfortable family nest. 
Two windows on the north—one on each side of the fire- 
place—two on the south, giving on the garden, two on the 
west and between them a glass casement door opening on the 
porch, admit a flood of light all day long. Half-length 
white curtains, with inside draperies of figured cretonne, 
HOMES AND GARDENS 
December, Ig11 
deck the six windows and the porch door. The peacock 
and foliage design of the cretonne, carried as it is around 
three sides of the room, produces the illusion of being in a 
bower, particularly as there is no distracting note in the 
wall-paper, for here, as elsewhere throughout the house 
(save in the nursery, the maids’ sitting-room and one or 
two of the bedrooms), the paper is of a modest, striped, 
pale buff, chosen with the intent that the walls, being all 
alike, should present merely an agreeable, inconspicuous 
background and not attract notice by a change of pattern 
from room to room. On the north side, equipped with a 
crane and of sufhcient dimensions to do justice to a wide 
family circle, is the fireplace, set ina mantel of good Colonial 
type, with reeded pilasters and central panel. Several rare 
old English bookcases of carved oak diffuse an air of intel- 
lectual substantiality from their shelves and are the solid 
“right worshipfuls” of the commonwealth of furniture. 
Sofas, easy chairs, secretaries and all the rest tell a tale of 
thorough comfort and convenience, while the little tea- 
table near the lounge is an earnest of perennial hospitality. 
Two children’s chairs, side by side against the wall near 
the steps, call to mind Southey’s remark that ‘‘a house is 
never perfectly furnished for enjoyment unless there is a 
child in it rising three years old and a kitten rising six 
weeks.” ‘The children, at least, of this household can be 
vouched for. As to the rest of the furnishings ‘“‘for enjoy- 
ment’’ it may be confidently stated that everything about 
the establishment plainly proclaims it was meant for whole- 
some ease. Some people inhabit houses; others live in 
homes. ‘This abode is everywhere instinct with the spirit 
of home. Every inch of the house is meant to be used and 
lived in, and is. ‘There is, heaven be praised, neither parlor 
nor drawing-room but a living-room. Here is complete 
emancipation from the frightful domestic ideals of a period, 
now happily past, that prescribed a parlor, a region of 
starched gloom and perverted furniture, to be followed 
later by its lineal descendant, the oftentimes no less dread- 
ful drawing-room, where one’s coffee after dinner would be 
chilled by the marrow-piercing frigidity of the surround- 
ings though the thermometer, if it were consulted, might 
register eighty. 
Speaking of dinner and coffee brings us to the dining- 
room, which we enter from the hall through a pair of glass 
casement doors so placed as to balance the French window 
opening on the terrace at the other end of the room. Three 
excellent paintings form the only adornment of the walls 
and are the more effective for the absence of distracting 
objects. ‘Che design of the bricks on the hearth is worth 
notice—set in broad bands of cement, they are laid swastika- 
wise, each swastika revolving about a small, square tile at 
