“We do not find, however, any great revolution in the matter of expanding dining tables, and are inclined to think their great convenience will prove a barrier to any wide-spread reform.”
A good table should be polished, not varnished, and protected when not in use by a substantial cover.
Side tables are serviceable when one’s space or purse will not allow of a sideboard, but sideboards are useful articles of furniture, and look better when made of the same wood as table and chairs. They should be simple of construction, with straight rather than curved lines, smooth surfaces, and with drawers easily get-at-able and lightly pull-out-able.
The sideboard should hold the table linen for daily use, the daily silver and cutlery, teacups and saucers. If, in addition, it can find room for a convenient box of biscuits, pot of ginger, or any simple refreshment for the late worker who likes a bite before going to bed, so much the better will it serve its purpose as a sideboard. Our grandmothers kept here decanters and wine glasses, but in these days of the W. C. T. U. wine is seldom found standing out boldly in sight in the dining room. In addition to the sideboard a small table or a butler’s tray should be ready to hand to hold dishes or food that must be used in the table service.
Cabinets for the display of china, closets let into the chimney for the safe keeping of nice glass, should feel themselves at home here, while plaques and old china plates seem to belong of right to the dining room, and can be arranged over doors by means of a tiny balustrade, or on the frieze, or as over-mantel decorations, while choice cups and saucers can fill the cabinet spaces. In the breakfast room, where I am now writing (not my own), I have just counted fifty-nine pieces of glass or pottery which hang on the wall or stand exposed on sideboard, mantel or shelves, besides the tiles of the fireplace, two small cabinets, each holding a half dozen rare and precious Japanese cups and saucers protected by glass, and two large cabinets filled to overflowing with specimen china, and yet the room does not seem at all overstocked with ceramic treasures.
Growing plants are charming dining room ornaments, but will only thrive where a minimum of gas and furnace heat and a maximum of sunshine and fresh air is supplied, with regular attention as to water and shower baths. They are sure, however, to reward painstaking care.
Decorative china and plants, however, are luxuries, though less or more within the reach of all. A screen, though usually looked upon as a luxury, is in the dining room almost a necessity, and it can be bought or manufactured at home for a nominal sum. Many a guest has been well nigh martyred at table with a fire in the rear and sunlight to the fore, whose meals might have been made a delight by a careful adjustment of shades and blinds and the judicious intervention of a screen between chair and grate. Doors must needs be left open as servants pass back and forth, and a screen between the mistress’s chair and the door may save her from many an annoying influenza.
A thick, white cloth of felt or Canton flannel should be spread over the table before it is “set.” This not only protects the polish of the table top, but makes the linen cloth lie much better, and appear to the best advantage.
Table linen should, so far as possible, be spotless. Fine damask is costly, but a clean, coarse cloth looks better than a fine one soiled and tumbled. It is true that table linen is worn more by washing than by use. Still it must be washed—at least that is the American theory. I have sat at a table in Saxony where the table linen bore the date of more than a century before, but there the wash was perhaps a semi-annual affair, and a breakfast cloth was made to serve from Easter till July, breakfast being only a simple meal of a roll and a cup of coffee.