About seven miles out of Palma on the Island of Majorca there is a fascinating country house owned by the Count of Montenegro to which he pays occasional visits. His dining-room, a yellow and blue room, was made lovely with a wood that I think must have been olive, it was so like the little boxes sold in Sorrento, burlaps, and blue and white Majolica. The heavy ceiling beams were of this yellow wood inlaid with great plates of genuine blue and white Majolica. The walls and high-backed olive-wood chairs were covered with undyed burlaps. The blue on the chairs appeared in coats of arms done in blue and white cotton and placed in the left-hand upper corner of each chair. An alcove at one end of the room was entirely filled with a glass-enclosed cupboard filled with the rarest specimens of blue and white Majolica.

When the country house is used for entertaining on an elaborate scale, when it represents nothing more, in fact, than a transfer of social obligations from a town house to one by the ocean or in the Highlands, the dining-room must be treated with a greater consideration. The informality and makeshifts can have no place in it. Indeed, when one ascends in the scale of sumptuous living, town and country-house dining-rooms differ but little. Nobody in town wants stuffy hangings in a dining-room. They are quite as objectionable in the country. Wood is used on the walls in either place, so are marbles and costly tapestries. The room is made to stand for itself, to suggest in every detail the fact that it has been made to dine in; that it is not an ordinary chamber transformed into an eating place by the presence of some chairs, a table, and a sideboard.

The back parlors of ordinary city houses are not necessarily dining-rooms - a chair, a desk, and a case for instruments, and the office of a doctor or a dentist appears; a few book-shelves and wide table and lamps, and we have a reading-room. At the same time these rooms may be made into lovely dining-rooms; but they must be treated with dignity.

"THE SIDEBOARD STANDS IN A CONVENTIONAL TOWN HOUSE DINING-ROOM".

The sideboard shown in one of the illustrations stands in a conventional town-house dining-room. A burlaps of exquisite apple-green hue covers the wall. The wood-work is white. The curtains are of fine green corduroy with silvery lights. The effect is cool and refreshing. A dinner in this room is a delight. Candles are used everywhere, on the table, the sideboard, and mantel; none of the oxygen in the air is consumed by gas.

In another dining-room with white wood-work and green walls, the hangings are of rose silk looped over brass rods. The rods, imitating an old fashion of a half-century ago, are huge gilt arrows, good in design because simple.

No lover of color will be content unless a dining-room is arranged so that every detail of light and color is made harmonious. This, of course, can only be accomplished after much study. An interesting example of what has been done is found in a dining-room of a town house, modelled, in the beginning, along purely conventional lines, its front and back parlor divided by folding doors. The room has a ceiling eleven and a half feet high. The dado, six feet in height, is a Japanese leather paper of dull mahogany red, finished by a shelf on which are placed bits of pottery and old tankards. From this shelf to the picture-moulding there is another Japanese paper, four feet wide, showing the mahogany and gold tones of Spanish leather. The frieze and ceiling are tinted with bronze gold. The woodwork is of cherry polished and darkened to a dull tone. The furniture is mahogany. The colored pictures are framed in gold; etchings in mahogany. None have white mats. All the lights are shaded with ruby glass, the gas never being turned above a point. From the four corners of the ceiling Venetian brass altar-lamps are suspended, the tapers hidden in ruby cups. The floor is covered with a dull red carpet, having a small design repeating the wall color. Hangings and chair covers are of dull red plush. A wistaria vine has been trained over an arbor that shades the dining-room window. The light through its leaves fills the room with a cool, yellow-green tone, and relieves it of all feeling of oppression when the heat of summer begins.

A gaily flowered paper is an impossibility in the dining-rooms of town houses, admissible as it may be in an apartment. Dark papers are restful but cannot give richness.

When French walnut is used to finish one of these conventional rooms, a high wainscoting, with Spanish leather above, makes a room of great dignity and repose. I know one instance in which the wood panelling for the walls was imported directly from Italy, and put up in an ordinary city dining-room. The window, thrown out as a big bay, was filled with leaded glass of charming restful tones. Of course no color appeared on the walls; even the covers of the low window-seats were subdued in tone. The treatment of the window was especially delightful, and its fashion a good one to follow.

In many cases a dining-room with panelled walls is quite destroyed by the introduction of ordinary window-frames with ordinary panes of glass, - panes of glass which in town must, of course, be curtained for privacy. When stained glass is out of the question, leaded panes, semi-clear, give a sense of seclusion. When following good designs, the leaded window helps to give the panelled room the air of a symmetrical composition. Ordinary window glass robs the room of elegance.

In a dining-room panelled with polished walnut the frieze is sometimes painted in rich, dull tones, after Venetian models, sometimes treated with plaster in low relief, or with leather. Thus one dining-room has mahogany wainscoting, the frieze above filled with a fine French cretonne chosen for its color and design, the nature of the material not being distinguishable at the height at which it appears. Green velvet brocade, repeating the tones of the stems in the flowered cretonne and broken by yellow, appear in the curtains and on the chairs. Chippendale mahogany furniture is used.