If you had sat with me in my kitchen this afternoon, my warm yellow-brown kitchen with its gay braided rugs and its gayer red geraniums; sat there and rocked in the stenciled rocker, while my kettle hummed on the stove and, outside, the snow sifted and tinkled against the windowpanes and whitened all the world - well, I am sure you would have loved it as much as I do.

Now, I must confess frankly that I do not care for a laboratory-like kitchen, a sterilized-looking place, though at first I did begin with aspirations and a boudoir decoration, all blue and white. Oh, my inexperience! But I soon learned how brief and transitory are all such delicate painted pleasures; how long and cold and frozen a winter here could be; and how warm and cheering I might make my kitchen with a brown-and-yellow livery: a yellow that had the tone quality of those old mixing-bowls; a brown with just enough red to brighten it and keep it from looking chocolate-y. You see, I had to create interest in an utterly uninteresting room.

My kitchen represents the new and rather prosaic ell that took the place of the rambling, picturesque sheds and outhouses which straggled half across the dooryard, and which had crumbled beyond any possibility of repair. That eighteenth-century kitchen was wide and ample, with queer little nooks and corners; and I should have loved so to play with it, restore it, keep it in outward semblance what it used to be. My kitchen to-day is trim and compact (ten by twelve feet), with a good-sized pantry opening from it, two windows (a third in the pantry), five doors, and no imagination whatsoever. That quality it was my task to supply, and this is how I did it.

Of course, my color-scheme established at once the decorative truth that I wished to present: a kitchen that should be warm and cheerful, with a sense of simple joys and homely intimacy, rather like a crock of spice cookies or a pan of hot gingerbread. I had, then, merely to elaborate it, to gather accessories that should continue the feeling, to take creams that deepened to yellows, and yellows that softened to browns, and black, with little touches of gilt; to make, in short, a kitchen that would be pleasant to sit and knit in while I waited for my dinner to cook; for the domestic pauses between maids grow longer and longer, and it is but wisdom to prepare for the inevitable.

When you come in from the dining-room and shut the door, I think you will see precisely what I mean. (By the way, I 'm rather proud of that door, because it's the old one, made just of two broad planks, one fourteen, the other seventeen inches wide. They don't build doors like that any more.) I wonder what you would notice first: my clock, or my rocker, or my rugs? Or my red geraniums on the window-ledge, or my cider-mugs, or my old Tole-ware? Let's "play" I am taking you round the room and showing you.

There's my big braided rug in front of the door, effective with its wide and heavy strands, and its blendings of yellow and red and black. Like the "house-rug" in my dining-room, if I had designed it and had it made for me I could n't have achieved anything more adapted to the place where it now lies. Indeed, I doubt if I could have thought out its heavy suitability - the outside braided, the inner strip closely knitted. And I bought it for seventy-five cents, at a rainy-day auction in the hills - an auction where there was nothing, apparently, but iron beds and Victorian maple bureaus, until I found this cheerful rug crumpled up and bundled away in one corner. My geraniums catch the twinkle of red, and my straight-hanging curtains (thank goodness, my windows, though not old, are small-paned!) take the yellow of the rug and the green of the geranium leaves, and weave them into a fabric that Caldecott himself might have used in his quaint and charming drawings. Yet the material was not expensive (twenty-five cents a yard), for I bought it ages ago, and I could n't have used more than nine and a half yards.

Then there's my rocker: cane-seated, cane-backed, the most comfortable chair in the world. This last statement I am sure of, because the family, who often revile me for my straight, uncompromising, old-fashioned chairs, all fight to sit in this one. The stencil for the top is full of color and delightfully unusual; the frame of the seat and the front stretcher are patterned with a mellow design, of a dim goldy-green, for the most part, though the top has touches of crimson, and, when the light catches it just right, a lustrous underbloom which reminds you of old lacquer. I got it for three dollars and a half at an auction, the most rural auction I ever attended, and, because of that naive simplicity, one of the most interesting gatherings I remember seeing.

There were other good things that went for little or nothing, too: old pressed glass and china - one farmer remarking scornfully that he would n't give a cow's tail for all the old "crockery" he saw there; a lovely astral lamp, more chairs, a few drawn-in rugs, and one or two interesting chests. And I got a stunning black-and-gold bas-relief mirror - one of the handsomest of this type that I have seen - for eleven dollars and a half. F------ bought another glass for five dollars, a great big one with a wide frame of that beautifully veneered mahogany they used so much in the early nineteenth century; R-----staggered under a topping load of Vermont imprints and old lanterns; and we all felt that we had done very well.

My table is a little younger than my chair (I should date that about 1830) and is very Victorian - brown walnut, with an elaborate curlicue-ing base and a round top that is scalloped like a cooky. It looks very well uncovered; it appears to even better advantage draped with a red-and-white cloth that makes you think of home and mother. This "goes" excellently with my color-scheme, for the scarlet echoes the red in my braided rug, the hue of my geranium blossoms; and yet it is the spiritual quality that I prize more, the mental note that it gives - a value too often overlooked in decoration. It was seventy-nine cents a yard, and I bought two yards of it in a little Vermont "corner grocery," which is, in reality, a great department store in miniature: a place where you get guns and crackers and veils and fresh eggs and taffeta ribbons and cowbells and prints and saucepans and neckties and molasses - everything! All in the tiniest compass! And as the shop lies just across the river from my house, I felt that it was most appropriate.