Like all transient fashions of dress or ornament, where the material is comparatively cheap, the patterns or colors of wall-paper are constantly changing, and new patterns and fashions are brought out every year. The small expense attending the decoration of a house enables each new occupant to choose the style of his mural adornment at frequent intervals. It is our aim here to present certain principles according to which a person may be able to select such mural and ceiling decorations as may be best adapted to the rooms he wishes to adorn. Nothing more keenly excites homesickness than the dismantling of a room where our life is usually spent. A sense of loneliness is produced by the removal of our paintings, book-case, and hanging shelves in an ordinary house cleaning, which is only effaced by a complete restoration after the cleaning is over. Wallpapers add as much or perhaps even more to our pleasure and comfort, at home, than pictures or other ornaments. The favorite painting may be dispensed with, but the harmony or disagreeable tints and figures on the wall-paper become a part of the room, and are not so easily be to disposed of.

They either possess the richness and repose suitable for a pleasing background to furniture, mirrors, and paintings, or their glaring, patchy colors kill the effect of the best picturas; and to many a nervous invalid they render his hours and days miserable, as he counts and combines over and over again the meaningless recurrence of a marked angle or curve, or the ever-repeated misshaped flower.

The first principle that should be considered in the choice of wall-paper, is that the decoration of the sides of a room ought always to be a background more or less rich, according to the circumstances, for the usual occupants, furniture, and ornaments, relieved against it. The choice of a pattern then becomes of secondary importance. A pattern that would be agreeable to, and suitable for, a large room, would not be for a small room, because little groups of objects on a wall-paper, covering a limited space, take pleasant, general figures, which, if they are seen scattered over a large surface, make combinations that destroy the effect of the most attractive patterns in detail.

In looking over a vast number of paper-hangings, one is apt to be impressed with the fact that the beauty of the paper arises much more from a successful combination of colors than from any special loveliness of design.

Patterns may be observed where, in a small set of squares, grave and rich effects are produced by a skillful variety of tints of olive and bronze, enlivened here and there by small touches of red. In some of these little squares are leaves of plants; in others, simple circles; and in others, some formal, geometrical patterns. Yet as a result of them all, we have a quiet and perhaps brilliant shadow, relieving against its rich hues, positive tints in clothing, or bright china, or brilliant glass, as well as the people and furniture in the room.

A person is almost always able to find in any stock of paper-hangings, a kind of paper so simple in its attempts at form and color, that any one is sure to be pleased if he covers his walls with it. These papers consist of narrow, simple stripes, tiny clover leaves, or it may be little star-shaped figures, grey or white, upon a background scarcely different from itself.

A cool and pleasant effect is always given to an apartment thus covered; and if rich oil-paintings could not bear the contrast with so chilly a color, no headache was ever aggravated by it, no ornament ever obscured. A paper so neutral is not positively offensive, though it may be of an antiquated style.