21 
HOUSE & GARDEN 
A rug from a Kali that had lain with its center in a passage between two 
doors. The center has received the brunt of all the traffic and is worn, 
while the rest is perfect 
This is how rugs are worn unevenly-exactly half the rug is exposed to 
wear. The other half is behind the door partly covered by a table and 
will remain untouched 
Before and ; 
the other 
a kitchen 
fter repairing: One s 
after end is woven on 
de shows end ravelled and sides gone; 
edge attached. This rug was found in 
department stores of having made commercial goods 
of Oriental rugs is true to the extent that no real 
antique rugs for which connoisseurs crave are any 
longer to be found on the general market. They are 
all in private homes. The reason for this is that they 
can only be developed in the homes. But private 
owners, as a general rule, do not know this and by 
heedlessness and misuse allow their rugs to com¬ 
pletely deteriorate. 
Let us follow a rug through its life in a typical and 
average case. 
The rug is made in the home of a native weaver in 
the Orient—in Persia, Caucasia or Turkey as the 
case may be. It is not made with a view to its imme¬ 
diate sale, and is very often used for many years in 
the home where it is made. Particularly fine rugs are 
the handiwork of the aristocrats of the land; they 
are made by women in the harems of Pachas, Sul¬ 
tans or Shahs, women who have the refinement and 
delicacy of taste and ample leisure time, all of which 
are necessary in the creation of a piece like a Gheor- 
dez, a rug that has a weave and colors unimitable, or 
an Ispahan that has as many as 600 hand-tied knots 
to a square inch. Such rugs as these and those made 
by girls for their trousseau, and prayer rugs on which 
the Mussulman offers his devoted prayers to Allah, 
are all cherished with much care, and only after the 
death of the maker do they go out of the possession 
of the original weaver. One can readily understand 
the quality of rugs that results from the painstaking 
care of a weaver who intends to keep it all his life. 
When such a rug eventually reaches the American 
home after passing through the hands of ten to twenty 
dealers, beginning with the peddling buyer of the 
Orient, who goes from village to village picking up 
rugs, and ending with the retailer in America, the rug 
is not, strictly speaking, brand new, and yet it is as 
new as an Oriental rug is expected to be and undoubt¬ 
edly in perfect condition, for the use it has had in the 
land of its maker is very mild compared to the use it 
is going to get in this country. In the Orient it would 
be a sacrilege not to remove the footgear before enter¬ 
ing a home; so it is seldom that a rug receives the 
hard impression of a shoe. Further, since there are 
no tables and other furniture covering any part of the 
rug, it is worn evenly, when worn at all. Here in 
America it is usual to see the nap worn off or still 
worse to see the rug becoming threadbare in a circle 
around a perfect center, which is the spot covered 
over by the dining-room table. 
The elements that rob the rug of its life are hard 
and careless use, stress of incompetent cleaning, acci¬ 
dental dampness, rough handling, etc. If the owner 
will take the trouble to avoid these and use judicious 
care, he can learn, with the help of an expert, to clean 
and make minor repairs when necessary, to lengthen 
the life of the rug and extend it to the required num¬ 
ber of years, after which only the rug can be called an 
antique and be worthy of pride. We must never lose 
sight of the fact that a rug to be an antique must be 
old. How to keep the rug in good condition so as to 
he old enough to be an antique is the question. The 
care necessary to attain this end is the following: 
First, the rug must be a genuine Oriental, made of 
good wool, vegetable dyes and not chemically treated. 
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