House Garden 
effort is made to follow the triclinium arrange¬ 
ment; otherwise little attention is paid to 
distribution. One serves as well as another, 
provided all the floor is concealed and all 
made soft to the foot. The Persian cer¬ 
tainly has not heard of Chevreul, for in the 
placing of rugs, and oftentimes in the making 
of them, he manifests a delightful disregard 
for danger of discord in the coloring. Colors 
whose theoretical antagonism would shock 
an American decorator are placed side by side 
on the Persian floor. Seldom you find a rug 
which indicates on the part of its maker the 
slightest notion of the theory of complement, 
and yet the Persian room, by reason of its 
rugs alone, soothes one, and satisfies that 
most critical of appetites—the color sense. 
"Phis, probably, is the natural and appro¬ 
priate place for the protest that the Persian 
apartment, devoid of anything like a big 
table or a chair, and even more innocent of 
profuse display of pictures, piperacks, bronzes, 
pottery, statuettes and such gear, is depress- 
ingly bare, to which the Persian would 
promptly reply that he had no desire to live 
in a museum, for his judgments of things 
are keen and as direct as the compass needle. 
As a matter of fact, the variegations in the 
rug’s design are his bric-a-brac, over which 
his eye wanders in moments of contem¬ 
plation, finding always new delights—new 
colors, shapes, suggestions—but returning, 
for a final impression, to the coordination, 
integrity, unity of the whole. There is no 
distraction, no conflicting jumble of variant 
trains of thought. He has rested, and 
enjoyed. 
This may seem fanciful, but it is the 
Persian’s doctrine in art. He has long 
known, what national neurosis is now prov¬ 
ing to us, that we of the West overload our 
lives; our minds, as well as our stomachs 
and our houses. And so, by rapid degrees, 
he goes about doing likewise. 
It must not be believed, wrongly, that the 
Persian has no bric-a-brac, that he does not 
rejoice in cunning workmanships, that he 
cannot find pleasure in a vase. The Persian 
of good taste treasures these things as fondly 
as do we—probably more so. Hut he does 
AN ARMENIAN FAMILY TAKING TEA 
Showing the Use of the Rug , the Samovar ami Method of Serving Tea prevalent throughout all Persia 
