I know some other pretty kitchens, too, one in particular, out of which many and many a delightful dinner has been served to choice companies gathered in the adjoining studio. It is only about nine by sixteen feet, this little kitchen of enviable repute. A gas stove occupies one corner next a sink having hot and cold water. When no cooking is going on the stove is concealed by a tall Japanese screen, and, because life in studio-buildings sometimes necessitates a makeshift or two, a pine settle is drawn up in front of this screen, a most comfortable settle, by the way, and accommodating - since it will seat two persons at any time, or answer as a table for dishes if the owner should so prefer. A heated poker, cleverly applied, has adorned it with a border of pretty design, and a coat of crude oil has given it the appearance of old oak. A set of shelves, made after an old Dutch model and treated in similar fashion, hangs between the doors, supporting quaint Dutch platters and jugs, bits of copper, and pitchers collected across the sea. Over the refrigerator, treated also to look like dark oak, hang other shelves filled with colored plates and dishes. There are no stuffs about, of course, no hangings, nothing in reality that does not belong to a kitchen. Neither is a single convenience sacrificed to artistic effects: I have only to remember the dinners to realize this; but any visitor to the studio might be asked to step into this little room and wait there, without having the least suspicion of his whereabouts, so delightfully is the whole spirit of an artist's interior suggested.

Another kitchen has been treated with blue paint, - wood-work and walls and shelves; brass kettles, candlesticks, lamps, and flowered china' putting the finish to its scheme of decoration. Then there is another, the walls of which have been covered with the blue and white oil-cloth used for kitchen tables, and which can be as readily washed as paint. Blue and white linoleum covers the floor. There are few things more delightful than a pine floor kept spotless by the daily application of the scrubbing-brush, though of course the question of the labor it involves must be taken into consideration. Such a floor should never be allowed to show a stain, otherwise it becomes worse than a spotted apron on a cook.

As I recall these kitchens, of how pretty and interesting and convenient they are, I wonder why it is that so little is done by other people to make similar places attractive. The lower one descends in the scale of social importance, the smaller the means, the more the kitchen is in evidence. There are many persons who cannot afford servants, or who can have only one, and all through the tenement districts there are people who must eat as well as cook in the same room, yet no attempt is made by these persons to grace them either with a touch of dignity or of importance. It seems to me sometimes, that the whole status of living might be raised were more attention paid to the subject, more interest felt in it. And the change could be so easily effected. First, admit only the things that could be scrubbed or shaken; then a little attention paid to the stove and the mantel, a little more building up about these; care displayed in the arrangement of dishes and cooking utensils, so that they become part of the decoration of the room, as they are in the old-world kitchens of the peasants - many of whom are in our midst. Were a tasteful grouping of dishes and cooking utensils effected about the stove and chimney-piece, a certain compelling note would be achieved at once, forcing the woman who worked beside it to keep from that part of the room all foreign and discordant elements, - bottles, papers, calendars that had become dusty months before - a host of other untidy articles would be found to have no place there, and from the feeling that they were out of place, would grow the need of providing special receptacles for them, or, better still, of doing away with them altogether.

The question of decoration, too, has been made easy in these days. The manufacturer has gone on improving his wares till there are not only pretty tins for teas and coffees and spices, but pretty chinas as well, either in pure white or blue and white; refrigerators are tiled, and kettles lined with porcelain; wood-boxes are both useful and ornamental; and the shapes of many of the commoner dishes are better even than those of the silver specially designed for the table - they make you want to go to work at once.

Many women do go to work at once - the women who do not belong to tenements. The fad for cooking-schools has developed latent talent among modern housekeepers, so that a lady experimenting with some new recipe is no longer the unusual spectacle she was during that interval when suddenly acquired wealth carried us away from the traditions of our grandmother's generation. Thirty or forty years ago domestic arts had grown to be regarded only as a form of menial service. To-day we are returning to better views. In the hands of the wholesome college-trained women of the present day domestic management bids fair to become almost as exact a science as the system of hygiene which controls the running of our institutions.

The farmhouse kitchen, and that of the more prosperous country-dweller, is almost always sure to be cheerful. Its environment, the presence of trees and vines, insures this. It is the kitchen of the house in town that is apt to be dreary, the kitchen sometimes half a story below the basement, the kitchen with old wood-work, and old tubs and smoked ceilings - the kitchen of houses, often enough, of luxury and comfort upstairs, but with no touch of improvement below. Sometimes, when such a touch is suggested by a sympathetic friend, the family is almost demoralized. And the arguments against it are most curious; remarks about hovels on the other side of the water, and the newfangled notions of the day on this, and the race of good, contented, hard-working servants dying out - nowhere, in any of the talk, the slightest remembrance of the fact that orders and conditions change everywhere, and that if they did not the world would be left in a stagnant condition.