is such an opportunity! out of unpromising materials and surroundings you have to make a room, whether bedroom or boudoir, which will take the impression of your own state. As long as a woman possesses a pair of hands and her work-basket, a little hammer and a few tin-tacks, it is hard if she need live in a room which is actually ugly. I don't suppose any human being except a gipsy has ever dwelt in so many widely-apart lands as I have. Some of these homes have been in the infancy of civilisation, and yet I have never found it necessary to endure, for more than the first few days of my sojourn, anything in the least ugly or uncomfortable. Especially pretty has my sleeping-room always been, though it has sometimes looked out over the snowy peaks of the Himalayas, at others, up a lovely New Zealand valley, or, in still earlier days, over a waving West Indian "grass-piece." But I may as well get out the map of the world at once, and try to remember the various places to which my wandering destiny has led me. All the moral I want to draw from this geographical digression is that I can assert from my own experience—which after all is the only true standpoint of assertion—that it is possible to have really pretty, as well as thoroughly comfortable dwelling-places even though they may lie thousands of miles away from
