Yellow, by the way, and not red, should be used in rooms where the sun does not shine. Yellow gives the effect of sunlight. When yellow is employed in the glass of a leaded pane, the effect on the gloomiest of days is of bright skies without. If blue is used in a north room, it should be relieved by white, - the soft, fluffy white of lace or sheer muslin, preferably of lace. The merest suggestion of delicate pink should appear in the room at intervals. Then you get a coloring as of white apple-blossoms against the blue of the sky. There seems a promise of coming sunshine somewhere.

Nothing would induce some persons to use red in a north room; or red with oak; or the bright new red of modern manufacture; or that with purple in it, the most hideous red of all. The old faded reds of Venetian and Spanish stuffs are not to be confused with these. They are beautiful anywhere. They are delightful, too, with dark oak. These old reds, however, are generally seen with the rich yellow of a gold braid or an embroidery. A golden thread is sure to appear. When red velvet is used to cover chairs, brass nails are introduced. These golds enhance the richness of effect. We cannot do without red. Some instinct in man makes him crave it, especially when the cold begins and nature herself shows a dash of it in forest and field. It is like a stimulant. It acts like the "trumpet call" to which the blind man, quoted by Locke, compared it. It rouses men to action and excites them to vigor. In summer we want to get rid of it in our rooms because it looks hot; but it looks hot because it looks energetic - not reposeful as green is reposeful.

All this brings me to a point that I wish particularly to make. It is not necessary to introduce red into a house to create an impression of warmth, though this color is often - and wrongly - employed for that purpose. A hall of white marble, if filled with growing plants and trickling fountains, not only suggests warmth, but convinces you of it. On entering a room where flowers flourish and water flows, you recognize instinctively the existence of heat. You realize that unless it were warm the flowers would droop, the water freeze. A room with white-panelled walls, green carpets and hangings, may be made more suggestive of warmth by the introduction of growing plants than by all the red hangings in the world. Notes of red among the greens make the composition better, add a certain tonic, as it were, like bitters to a beverage, or pepper to a sauce.

I stayed, not long since, in a country house. One of its parlors was covered with a paper showing branches of green willow-leaves on a white ground. The wood-work was white, the sofas green. There were bare floors and rugs. The southern windows were filled with plants, one a flowering geranium. I saw this room afterward on one of the coldest winter days, when winds were howling and snow drifting. A fire burned on the hearth. There were wood-fires in all the other rooms, and southern windows in some, but none had the sense of snugness and warmth felt in that green and white parlor with its geraniums in bloom.

As a decoration red is most interesting, but it must be used with discretion. A room with walls covered with Turkish red, embroideries, and draperies, - crimson, rose, brick, tawny reds, and soft pinks, - may be made beautiful, but only when an adept has been at work. The amateur attempting such a room would in all probability produce a series of discords.

The good pinks are made by a combination of red and white. Some pinks set one's teeth on edge, - those having in them a mixture of blue. Others that run into soft tea-rose tones and made by a little yellow mixed in with red and white are full of a refreshing quality. With pink walls white woodwork seems imperative, as it does equally with blue. White or very light furniture is suitable, although mahogany never fails to adapt itself to pink walls. Mahogany always seems like a well-bred guest: introduce a bit of it into almost any home and it will adapt itself at once to its environment. I saw it in a pink and white morning-room the other day, among satin couches, and I felt it added a note of distinction, as the well-bred, of affable manners, always do. In the simplest of rooms it would have been quite as much at home. This particular morning-room had a wainscoting of white wood running from the floor to a four-inch border of white rose-wreathed paper enclosing a paper imitating pink watered silk. The windows were hung with satin similar to that covering the couches. It was a room strictly adapted to the needs of its beautiful owner, who used it only for the writing of letters and the reading of light literature after breakfast. Serious pursuits would have been impossible in it. Pink is never the color of a student's mood, although it may be that of a cheerful philosopher's.

Although mahogany will make itself at home in different environments, it is never so happy as when associated with golden browns, with the browns that have been made sunny with yellow and red.

When a room is to be hung with many pictures, or filled with pottery or porcelain, this sunny brown makes a charming setting. The chairs and sofas that are covered with it subordinate themselves, keeping the lower part of the room, as it should be kept, in a subdued key, leaving the eye free to travel where it will over the pictures or the pottery above.

By combining golden browns and dull yellows with notes of red, you can make your interior not only sunny and cheerful, but hospitable, since you can introduce almost anything into it. You may get the greens of mosses or ferns among the red browns of oak-leaves covering the ground in a wood-land - exhilarating effects which, as you see them, make you wonder what has happened to inspire you with so cheerful a mood.