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Show HOLLAND MAD. The Enterprising and Honest Dutch Ha Captured Gotham. The town has suddenly gone Holland mad, not as that thrifty little kingdom did when it lost its heart over tulipa and threatened to bring the finances of the country to ruin, but wisely, discreetly dis-creetly mad, as New Yorkers become. The china shops are filled with Delft, the silversmith's cases with Dutch silver sil-ver and the very milliners display little lit-tle Dutch bonnets, fashioned like the quaint peaked caps worn by the good dames of old Amsterdam. Even Dutch furniture has become a craze, and fashionable fash-ionable shoppers are passing by the gorgeous gor-geous empire styles, decorated with the laurel leaf, to buy the Dutch sofas and cabinets, curiously inlaid with rare woods and wrought with picturesque carving. In far better taste is this Dutch furniture, fur-niture, fashioned, a3 it is, by hand to meet the domestic needs of a sincere, honest folk, than the empire furniture, with its bizarre ornamentations of gilded gild-ed metal and its mock classic patterns, designed to suit a newly created aristocracy. aris-tocracy. If we could but bring back the simple domestic spirit of the Dutch with our Dutch fashions, it would settle many a social problem, but Dutch fashiff as they now appear are as costly r the gilded fashions of Louis XV or te empire. em-pire. It has long been an established fact that one must pay most extravagantly extrava-gantly for refined simplicity, so that Delft is often almost as costly as Dresden. Dres-den. There are pretty fruit baskets in Delft, "drug vases," low bedtime candlesticks, can-dlesticks, shoes and the most altogether delightful tiles imaginable, duplicating in pattern old tiles, some of which still exist in manor houses in old New York and near Albany. It is now possible to get almost all the new shapes in this modem Delft, as it is a wise European custom to save all designs used in th china factory. New York Tribune. |