Nickel-plating
is perhaps a less pleasing white, but is cheaper and does not discolor
readily. Windows are in most respects a great blessing; but there may
be too much of a good thing. It is unreasonable to expect that one
grate or stove or furnace can heat a whole county. Don't attempt it.
If you have too many windows on the "cold side" of a house, give
them double sashes (_not_ double panes), and "weather-strip" them.
Unpainted trimmings should be of hardwood. Yellow pine finishes up
well. Butternut is brighter than walnut. Cherry makes a room cheerful.
Walnut is dull and dismal.
The Forests of the World.--The rapid exhaustion of the forests of the
world, and more particularly of the once great reserves of timber in
the United States and Canada, renders it inevitable that, in a very
few years indeed, iron must supersede wood for a variety of uses. The
drain upon the world's resources in timber is prodigious. Every year
92,000,000 railway sleepers are used in America alone, while to supply
firewood for the whole of the States, fourteen times the quantity of
wood consumed by the railways is annually required. At the computation
of the most recent statistics there were 441,000,000 of acres of
woodland in the United States; but since over 50,000,000 of acres are
cut down yearly, this great area of timber will be non-existent in
less than twenty years, unless replanting upon a very extensive
scale be at once undertaken. Already efforts are being made in this
direction, and not long since some 4,000,000 of saplings were planted
in a single day in Kansas and the neighboring States.
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