Presently the little movable sideboard, with its dainty collection of cold dishes and salads, was wheeled outside by the solitary maid who waited upon them, and nothing was left upon the table but a delicately-shaped Venetian decanter of Château Yquem, liqueurs in tiny bottles, the coffee served in a jug of beaten copper, and an ivory box of cigarettes.

Bellew, watching all this from where he sat screened from the throng by a great carved sideboard, and divers chairs, and whatnots,drew rather harder at his pipe, and, chancing to catch Adam's eye, beckoned him to approach.

The chairs and tables were of heavy, ponderous, mid-Victorian make, and they were matched by a number of old-fashioned mahogany sideboards and presses, arranged methodically at regular intervals on both sides of the room.

Then he told how they distributed the finished sideboards among farmhouses in various parts of Belgium and Holland and France, where they were left to be "discovered," ha, ha, ha!

A funny little sideboard and cupboard contained a slender stock of knives, forks, and glasses, and part of a broken-down dinner set, while the fireplace easily held three dozen of soda-water.

In the dining-room our interest was quickened upon our being told that the handsome sideboard had belonged to the Byrd family.

He pointed to a Japanese print in a black frame that hung near the massive sideboard.

Presently the little movable sideboard, with its dainty collection of cold dishes and salads, was wheeled outside by the solitary maid who waited upon them, and nothing was left upon the table but a delicately-shaped Venetian decanter of Château Yquem, liqueurs in tiny bottles, the coffee served in a jug of beaten copper, and an ivory box of cigarettes.

The portraits of ancestors had been taken from the walls and the glinting pewter plates and goblets were gone from the large oaken sideboard.

The pedestal sideboard, with a large mirror in a scrolled frame at the back, had come in; the chairs were massive and ugly survivals of the earlier reproductions of the Greek patterns, and, though solid and substantial, the effect was neither cheering nor refining.

Mirrors, set in ponderous frames of old Florentine gilding, dimly reflect every object; narrow, high-backed chairs and carved wooden benches, sculptured mosaic tables and ponderous sideboards covered with choice pottery from Gubbio and Savona, and Lucca della Robbia ware.

And when the pretty sideboard and work-table had been thoroughly rubbed and set up, and all the little knick-knacks arranged on the mantel-piecewhen the white curtains were hung at the windows, and the chairs and dining-table each in its proper place in relation to the piano, our parlor was pronounced "magnificent."

The term "stately sideboard" occurs in Milton's "Paradise Regained," which was published in 1671, and Dryden, in his translation of Juvenal, published in 1693, when contrasting the furniture of the classical period of which he was writing with that of his own time, uses the following line: "No sideboards then with gilded plate were dressed.

" Mrs. Grummit made no reply, but, throwing appearances to the winds, stepped to the window until her nose touched, as a walnut sideboard with bevelled glass back was tenderly borne inside under the personal supervision of Police-Constable Evans.

They were used with great success on state occasions and were so convenient that other people adopted the invention, so that wine coasters, after the Washington design, became a part of the furniture of every fashionable sideboard.