It was Mr. Leslie Stephen, I believe, who remarked, of the repartees of
the late Dr. Samuel Johnson, that it was futile to defend them except
to those who enjoyed them without defense. Some color of this same
good-humored contempt, this faintly supercilious _laissez-faire_ [or,
as the French phrase has it, this spirit of leave it lay], has too long
characterized the attitude of antiquers in general toward those who
seem, to the esoteric view, at least, Philistine, gentile.
Antiquers have, as a rule, contentedly held themselves above the
indignity of proselyting; a little jealous, perhaps, of their relative
rarity, they have looked askance, or two, even, at those who strayed,
unbidden, into their company. It was, they felt, enough to be an
antiquer and to antique; they knew no restless itch for converts; they
believed, or affected to believe, that the antiquer is as impossible of
post-natal evolution as the ventriloquist or the Ethiopian.
Herein, as Professor Kilgallen has at last made manifest, antiquers
have been doubly at fault—at fault in a parochial willingness to
conserve for their own behoof an avocation at once innocent, diverting,
and, if individual taste so incline, remunerative; at fault again in
assuming that the antiquer must needs be born [in the vernacular] that
way.
These errors, happily, no longer reproach the confraternity at large.
The popularization of antiqueing, under the purposeful leadership of
Professor Kilgallen, is, one may assert, almost a _fait accompli_, or,
as the clever Gallic dictum puts it, an accomplished fact. And it has
been incidentally established, surely, that the antiquer may be made
almost as expeditiously and convincingly as the antique itself.
[Illustration: PLATE I
OLD DUTCH OVENSIDE CHAIR WITH THE RARE PRETZEL BACK; PICKED UP IN
A PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN SETTLEMENT BY PROFESSOR KILGALLEN
Sketch by the Professor
]
The inspiring example of Milton Kilgallen, and the indisputable success
of his endeavors, have, together, persuaded me that I have been even
more at fault than those esoteric antiquers, if I may, for the last
time, so describe them, toward whom, in the pride of my peculiarity,
I have felt and spoken very much as they, in turn, have felt and
spoken of the Philistine proper. For years, sedulously and vigilantly
I have enjoyed a monopoly of the great branch of the art and science
of antiqueing which continues to preoccupy my powers. I have made no
effort to interest other antiquers in my province; I have thought of
them, indeed, as scarcely less pitiable than those to whom an antique
is a piece of, in the vulgar idiom, junk.
Too, even had I felt a need of sympathy and envy and applause in my
secret ambitions and achievements, I should have been restrained from
the essay to share my enthusiasm by my fixed belief that it could be
acquired in no way except that accident of inheritance by which it came
to me.
_Peccavi_, or, in the perhaps more pungent idiom of Cicero, I have
sinned. I now make confession and, as far as may be, atonement. I
reveal my guarded secrets, at last, without reserve.
I am still, I believe, the only antiquer ahead, _sui generis_, or,
to adopt the scintillating Italian phrase, alone in my class. Rather,
now that these lines have seen the light, _fui_, _non sum_. I have
been, as the Latins put it, not I am. For it will be enough to whisper
my revelations; there will be, to-morrow, I realize, more antiquers
ahead than one can shake a stick—if the reader will indulge me in the
solecism of ending a sentence prepositionally—at.
To this I am resigned. Long enough have I enjoyed the sole entry to an
entire tense; long enough have brother and sister antiquers rummaged in
the traditional and commonplace haunts of the antique, the past; long
enough have they ventured no farther than the abode of the antiquer—the
present. To-morrow, forsaking these well-trodden precincts, they will
join me in the virgin, but pregnant, future.
Like me, they will stoop no longer to the facile, shameful processes
of searching, in cobwebbed bins and attics, for antiques which any
novice must recognize, at a glance, as old. Like me, they will even
smile at the enthusiasms of those who scratch in the dust and crow,
like barnyard fowl, at each inevitable discovery. Like me, they will
know the pure joy of explorations and discoveries among the boundless
stores of to-morrow’s antiques.
I must begin at the beginning, with my birth. My destiny was
predetermined by the ancestry of which I sprang. My parents, both of
sturdy native stock, were by instinct mated to produce the original
antiquer ahead. It was inevitable, I apprehend. It was to be. It was.
My father, worthy fellow, had no clear knowledge of his natural
talent. My mother, I sometimes fancy, was remotely, dimly conscious
of her gift. I can recall, as yesterday, the exalted look with which
she witnessed the removal, from our stately parlor, of the array of
commonplace antiques with which it had been furnished, the joy with
which she and my father arranged, instead, those potential antiques
which only the gropings of their common hunger recognized for what they
were.
Even I, then in plaid kilts, did not at once share their delight,
their understanding. I found the red plush surface of that priceless
varnished oak sofa a harshly ticklesome affair; I was, to be sure,
impressed by the new frosted globes adorning the gasolier, the
intricate arabesques of the plaster rosette on the ceiling, from which
it sprouted downwards; I need not say, surely, that these globes,
tinted a glorious winey purple, decorated with protuberant knobs and
profound depressions, were none other than those very treasures of the
Obenchain collection, famous in four hemispheres as the sole surviving
set of admitted Roscoe Conkling gas-glass. They were, and I must marvel
helplessly before the phenomenon of instinct which urged my father, a
simple-minded barber in the town of Yonkers, to choose, unerringly, for
the tastes of fifty years beyond!
His taste, untutored by any device of art, was all but infallible.
He left me this, and with it the store of masterpieces which have,
discreetly vended, placed me beyond the reach of that financial anxiety
which, especially after the invention of the safety razor, clouded
his declining days. My unhappy father! It was his lot to begin his
profession in the full flower of the Whisker Period, and to survive
those troubled years only to confront the ignoble age of the tubed
cream and the tame, inglorious two-edged blade. It is impossible for me
to think of him save with a filial tear, and yet how cheerful he was!
How his place of business invited and allured the intellectual society
of Yonkers of his day! How the racked, lettered mugs gleamed in the
gas-lights! And how the air, of a Saturday night, was gay with innocent
mirth and pungent anecdote!
Thus I began, equipped by lavish Nature as if to recompense in me
the leanness of my paternal lot. Our house, long before I grew to
trouserable age, was filled to flowing with such a collection as not
even the indefatigable burrowings of the ineffable Rapp and Heller
could, in these degenerate times, assemble. In the parlor—incredible
as it may sound—stood, not one, but two Ulysses Grant cuspidors, one
nicked a trifle, but the other flawless—the priceless forget-me-notted
Grants, I mean, not the relatively common gilt-edged type. They were
even then my father’s chiefest pride; I—gratified in other boyish
whims—was never suffered to use either of them except by stealth.
He treasured them, born antiquer that he was, undreaming that the
pair would one day yield his son a thousand-fold their modest cost.
I owe him for them; my mother, herself no less percipient in other
lines than he, would have discarded them when, after the unforgetable
visit of Moody and Sankey, my father forewent his self-indulgence in
tobacco; but his taste was true. He clung to them with a dogged, blind
attachment for which I bless him still.
[Illustration:
PAIR OF WONDERFUL OLD FRENCH STATUETTES NOW THE
PROPERTY OF DR. TWITCHETT
The owner has identified them as Sèvres and pronounces them
portrait statuettes—No. 1, Victor Hugo in one of his moods; and
No. 2, a certain Marquis de St. Quai, probably a patron of Victor
Hugo.
]
It was my mother who provided me with my inheritance of _objets-d’art_,
or, as my Parisian friends prefer to say, objects of art. In its way
her instinct was as infallible as my father’s own, though possibly
more limited in scope. Indefatigably she scrimped and saved to bring
together the nucleus of my subsequent collection. It would be cruel,
in the present era of inflation, to set forth the catalogue. My
estimable colleague Van Loot, forewarned as he is, would not survive
the list, even if I omitted the prices, but I owe her memory at least
the tribute of some little particularity in the connection. It was she
who far-sightedly sacrificed our Thanksgiving turkey to procure the
figures of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, obtainable then, in the admirable
porcelain work of the period, for the trifling sum of three dollars
each, and even urged upon the buyer at that price by the agent of the
pious firm which held the monopoly of their production. My mother, I
remember, shrewdly beat him down to $2.75, and exacted that ten cents
of this sum should be paid in trade at my father’s shop—the agent
happily requiring his professional attention at the moment.
It was typical of her, this combination of prodigality and thrift—the
distinguishing characteristic, as Professor Kilgallen has so often
said, of the true antiquer. Without knowing why she did it, my mother
could and did perform prodigies of economy to lavish the slow, niggard
savings in which they fruited on the gratification of her driving,
dominant passion for that which, she must have realized, would be one
day an antique. It was what we learned to expect of her, my father and
I; he complained only covertly, when our Thanksgiving dinner revealed
itself to be the usual baked beans and pork, and cautioned me with
emphasis against repeating in my mother’s hearing the remarks he
permitted himself on the subject in the relative privacy of the shop.
As zealously as my father his Grant cuspidors, so did my mother cherish
and guard the images of the exhorters. They stood like tutelary saints
at either extreme of our mantel-shelf, dusted by no hands but her own,
at once the pride and solace of her lot. In spite of breath-stopping
offers—among them the blank, signed check tendered me by Cornelius
Obenchain Van Loot in person—I have never brought myself to part with
them, although, having now become obvious antiques, they possess but a
purely sentimental interest for me.
So, too, have I preserved the glass cane which our journeyman barber, a
roving, sportive soul, brought with him from the Centennial Exposition
at Philadelphia, during the closing days of the fruitful Grant Period.
I cannot forget the intensity with which my mother thirsted for
possession of this trophy; she gave the adventurous journeyman no peace
until he consented to part with it, taking payment in the laundering of
his stiff-bosomed shirt, which, indulging a taste for display perhaps
out of harmony with his station, he rarely wore more than a week
without having it restarched and ironed.
The cane, affixed with a bow of wide red ribbon to our parlor wall,
became, presently, a proof that our family had visited the Centennial.
I held my tongue in the presence of impressed visitors, learning
swiftly to avoid the unstimulating truth and, no doubt, even then in
vague, secret sympathy with my mother’s aspirations. She must invent
a reason for buying a thing at once so impractical and so little
decorative; she did not guess that she saw in it an antique beyond
price; perforce she explained her purchase on the disingenuous and
unworthy ground that folks would be bound to think we’d went there and
bought it right off them glass-blowers our own-selves. But I knew. I
understood. Even then, I must believe, I was an antiquer ahead.
For, with my own savings, one Christmas in the Arthur Period, I bought,
as a gift to both parents in common, no less a treasure than a genuine
Garfield toothpick-container—the miniature, in genuine pressed glass,
of a silk hat, which, inverted, stood for a decade in the centre of
our table on all occasions of state, and which, with its original
content of toothpicks, including four showing signs of actual use, I
reluctantly disposed of to the buyer for Queen Mary’s collection at
a price which both modesty and my gentleman’s agreement forbid me to
confess.
It was only natural that I should react to the twin stimuli of
inheritance and environment. My early days were spent in the constant
and inspiring contemplation of articles of _vertu_ which the most
discerning taste of the contemporary moment would not have recognized
as even potentially antiques. I could not, indeed, enter our house
without contemplating the statuettes of the Christian Slaves who knelt,
one on each side of the steps, mutely supplicating the beholder’s piety
and pity. If I would strike a sulphur match in the front hall, to light
my way up the stairs to bed, I must do it on nothing less precious than
a perfect specimen of the Benjamin Harrison match-holder—the peculiarly
rare and exotic type, I mean, wherein a mother hen and a young chick
are depicted, the mature fowl’s plumage being formed cunningly of
colored sand-paper and the wee chickling being made to say, in a loop
issuing from its open beaklet: “Don’t scratch me—scratch Mother.”
This, even in those unappreciative days, was held far preferable to
the alternative device, wherein a frowzy vagabond is illustrated, his
raiment a mosaic of sand-paper fragments, with the legend: “Scratch
your matches On my patches.” We possessed a number of these, in
addition to the rarer article already described.
Our home, simple though it was, and afflicted always with the pressure
of harsh poverty, was veritably a treasure-house of potential antiques.
It was impossible to enter any room without coming under their subtly
stimulating influence—even the bathroom contained, from my earliest
recollection, the most perfect specimen of the Garfield tin tub I
have ever seen, and the incidental plumbing, though hidden, according
to the mode of the moment, under a mask of painted pine, was in
entire harmony with the spirit of this dominating piece. Our mantel,
in addition to the figurines already mentioned and illustrated, was
laden with the tokens of my parent’s discernment and discretion.
There was an all but priceless decalcomania picture on varnished
wood, portraying the glories of Niagara Falls; there was a wealth of
companion pieces, illustrating the Natural Bridge, Ausable Chasm, the
Town-Hall of Darien, Connecticut, and an especially rare piece [_circa_
’84] purporting to be merely a souvenir of Sulphur Springs Grove, Erie
County, New York, and long since unobtainable except at auctioneers’
sales of large and unusually complete collections.
I inherited, among other treasures, my father’s unusually
well-preserved file of Police Gazettes, running back to that celebrated
issue in which Lillian Russell’s portrait appeared for the first time.
The man, simple and unpretentious as he was, possessed a true genius
for preserving such memorabilia and discarding items of little or no
value. These pink pages were his pride and treasure through dark days
of stress and privation; he handled them reverently, even when they
were fresh from the press, and insisted that those of his patrons
who examined them should treat them with circumspection. Invariably,
with the advent of a new issue, the previous one, tenderly smoothed
and flattened, was laid away in the closet, to be bound when occasion
permitted. Connoisseurs have told me that I erred in parting with this
collection when I accepted the proposals of that prince of antiquers,
Morton Fitz, in 1913. I realize that the file must inevitably have
appreciated heavily in value with the passage of another decade, but I
have no regrets. It was too difficult for me to look over those ageing
pages without yielding to the weakness of tears. _Eheu, fugaces_ ...
not even in the recent era of display of certain anatomical details
could the eye rest so happily on opulent, artless curves ... the
flesh-tones, too, thanks to the happy selection of the paper, were
poignantly realistic. I am not sorry that I parted with them all. I am,
always, an antiquer ahead, and these had become antiques of the past.
_Ave_, and farewell.
There must be an end even to the reminiscences of an antiquer.
And my purpose, in this paper, has not been to excite a vain envy
in the readers of the “Atlantic,”† but rather to invite them to
antique, hereafter, in the hereafter, to espouse, if they will, that
all-but-maiden fancy which has beguiled my leisured hours for twice two
lustrums [forty years]. They, too, if they please, may be antiquers
ahead instead of back.
————
† This essay, with others of Mr. Twitchett’s charming papers,
inevitably first saw the light in the periodical which, most
happily, reflects the spirit of the antiquer.
My great discovery of my own talent for this field of art came to me,
seemingly, by chance; but, after all, who dare affirm that such things
owe their origin to blind accident, that there is behind events so
pregnant no purposeful and actuating Cause? Not I, of all men. I say
seemingly. So be it. The way of it was this:
Workmen had demolished a decaying building which stood, in those days,
within a few squares of my father’s humble cottage. With other boys of
the vicinity I had looked on, fascinated by the appeal which wanton
destruction must exert on youth. Like them I had dreams, too, of buried
treasure below those venerable timbers, and burrowed hopefully among
the litter which the wreckers left behind. One of my playmates after
another kicked aside, in these explorings, a metal object. I found it,
and, inspired by that inherited passion for the antique which has ruled
my days, held it, examined it. A cry of joy escaped me: I detected,
along one of its blunt edges, the corrosions of what seemed to me might
have been spilled blood. I looked more closely still, crouching, now,
shielding my treasure from the glances of the bigger boys, able, if
they guessed the nature of my trove, to snatch it from me and make
it theirs instead. I slunk away. In safe seclusion I looked again.
There could be no doubt. To that sinister rusted edge stout, short
hairs still adhered! I thrust the precious relic inside my shirt and
sped homeward. In my ingenuous, artless youth I made sure that I had
found a token of some ancient deed of blood; that luck had led me to a
trophy such as no other youth in all Yonkers—at that day—could hope to
possess. I hid it lovingly below my Sabbath garments in my bureau
drawer, and gloated over it, in private, when the thing seemed safe.
[Illustration: PLATE II
MAGNIFICENT OLD FLAT-FRONT EARLY NEW JERSEY SIDEBOARD DISCOVERED
BY PROFESSOR KILGALLEN IN AN OBSCURE PART OF NEWARK
]
Inevitably, I was taken in the act. My father found me fondling my
relic and took it roughly from me.
“What you got there, Eb?” He held it gingerly, for his profession had,
of course, made him fastidious. He was always careful of his hands,
my father. He always washed them with soap, before coming home to
meals, even after shaving a dozen customers! My treasure displeased his
cleanly instinct, I could see.
“A murderer’s knife,” I whispered. “It’s mine! I found it under the
McWhorter house. See—there’s some hairs stuck to it!”
My father flung it from him. “You’d ought to know the difference
between bristles and hair—and you a barber’s son! That ain’t a
knife—’tain’t nothin’ only Dib McWhorter’s old sow-scraper! Seen a
hundred jes’ like it! Folks used to keep ’em for hog-killin’ time, when
everybody kep’ a pig and done his own butcherin’. Scrape the bristles
with.”
I was crestfallen at the sordid truth. For a moment I almost shared
my father’s fastidious disgust. But, when he had gone, my instinct
reasserted its control of my emotions. I recovered the sow-scraper
from the rag-carpet where it lay. I replaced it reverently in its
hiding-place. Why? I told myself, then, that my father was wrong; that
it was no sow-scraper, but in truth the instrument of some forgotten,
gory deed. I clung to it. And, later, when it had lost its first
vivid appeal, I fetched it down to exhibit it to that great patron of
antiqueing, no less a person than Cornelius Obenchain Van Loot himself.
He had stumbled on our humble dwelling in one of his tireless searches
for the antique—quests which, the world knows, have led him even
farther afield than Yonkers and Poughkeepsie. He had bought from my
mother an excellent set of bedroom enamelware [circa ’88] and his
appetite had been whetted by the success. He wanted more. I remembered
my relic. This man, to my untutored eye, seemed artless and even
a little contemptible—an opinion in which, I perceived, my mother
concurred. [He possessed then, as now, that remarkable faculty of the
gifted antiquer for convincing vendors of his complete simplicity.] I
might persuade him, I reflected, that the bristles were human hair; it
seemed unlikely that he could be expert in such distinctions, unless
he had been, like me, a barber’s son. I shall not soon forget his
cry of joy as his eye fell on my scraper. It was the one time in my
acquaintance with him that he permitted himself to betray satisfaction
before a bargain had been closed. It cost him, on this occasion, twenty
dollars.
“By all the gods, a sow-scraper—a genuine, unquestionable sow-scraper,
with bristles, intact, in excellent condition! Boy, did you come
honestly by this? No tricks, now! Is it your own to sell?”
I established, with my mother’s ardent corroboration, my character and
my title. The great Van Loot believed, at last.
“Priceless,” I heard him murmur. “Perfect! Superb!” and then aloud, to
me: “Little man, I’ll give you twenty dollars for this old piece of
iron. Twenty dollars—!”
“I guess you will,” I said, even then actuated by the instinct of the
antiquer. “Who wouldn’t? See any green in my eye?” [A phrase since
fallen into disuse, but at that date much in favor.] “You gimme fifty
and we’ll talk.”
We compromised at forty. It was a triumph rather for my family than
for me, for my mother expropriated the cash before I could escape, and
subsequently invested it, happily for me, on a mustache-cup dutifully
gilt-lettered “Father,” a small bone carved in the crude semblance of a
human hand and attached to a long slender rod [an instrument employed,
as all antiquers know, in the day of red-flannel underwear, for the
comforting purpose of scratching an itching back without the tiresome
routine of removing clothes], and a pottery sculpture of a pug-dog,
which articles, ripened into antiques by the amiable, intervening
years, yielded me some thousands per centum on the investment. But the
episode was far more significant than it seemed, in its effect upon my
life.
Forty dollars was the price current of a sow-scraper. I consulted my
father, cannily. They had been made, it appeared, by the local smith,
at a uniform price of twenty-five cents. His memory is accurate.
Informed of the transaction he used emphatic speech in regretting his
failure to lay in a stock, in the days of plenty. It would have paid
better, he averred, than barbering for Jay Gould himself, or curling
Ferd Ward’s own whiskers!
From that day I was a blooded antiquer ahead. I have no passion for the
merely old; it would be as unexciting, for me, to delve and seek for
treasure in dusty corners, after the habit of the commonplace antiquer,
as to angle for goldfish in a glass bowl. I play the nobler game. I
antique, not in yesterday, but in to-morrow.
Ah, the fascination of it! The intoxication of tearing the veil from
the inscrutable hereafter, the blood-quickening element of risk, as one
selects and stores away the antiques of to-morrow-years, against the
day of rarity and famine! Ah, the triumph of a well-stocked bin, sealed
till the day of reckoning! I have enjoyed these delights alone; I share
them, now, with those who have the soul to follow in my steps.
Since the closing days of the first Cleveland Period, I have
systematically antiqued ahead, privately, unadvertised, secretly
exulting. Even now, those earlier bins and cupboards have begun to
justify my penetrating choice. Who, of all the unthinking thousands who
beheld the wired bustle in its heyday, thought to preserve a full dozen
against to-day? Who, but Eben S. Twitchett, ridiculed as a crank and a
fanatic by his neighbors, unhonored and unsung by myopic antiquers,
the prey of dealers in alley trash?
Who, but Eben S., had the forethought to store, in ample camphor, a
perfect set of Harrison red flannels, and no less than six petticoats
of the same material and date? Who, of all the gray-haired collectors
who seek and cherish them to-day, but might have laid by as full a
stock as mine of lapel-buttons [_circa_ ’94] bearing the obsolete
argot of the period—quip and jest which have all but lost their
significance now? Or the buttons advertising bicycles—The Rambler and
the Tribune—built with a truss—the Victor and Columbia and Pierce? Who
had the wit and courage to store away the stereoscopes and the twin
photographs that in them found perspective—priceless and unattainable
to-day? The Chinese Tea Pickers? The Yellowstone? Brooklyn Bridge?
Who boasts of these but Eben S. Twitchett, with his mid-ninety bin
crammed to overflow with perfect specimens? Who stored the spun-glass
trinkets of the Chicago Fair? Who, if he chose, might break the market
in cylindrical phonograph records of “Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” and
“The Stars and Stripes Forever”? Who, I ask, possesses one gross of
American flags of the McKinley Period, each exquisitely inscribed with
its “Remember the Maine—to hell with Spain”? Who can supply collectors
with uncut, first edition pamphlet copies of the Great Cross of Gold
oration, each with its rare Bryan print—that almost unobtainable
portrait including hair?
The reader bears with my little pæan of triumph. These things are
history, among antiquers of high degree and low and middle. But who, of
all those who beat on Eben S. Twitchett’s doors to-day, who plead and
supplicate for even a peep into the sealed bins of the Roosevelt Epoch,
who, of all these, has the courage to antique, in this year 1923, for
the antiquers of to-morrow?
Eben S. Twitchett has. Time, the great revealer, shall one day let
in full light on the storerooms where his treasures are laid down,
to-day as yesterday. What will Time see there? Ah, that is for each
forward-looking antiquer to determine for himself. I cannot bring
myself to share too many of my secrets, even now. And the true antiquer
would regret a guidance too exact; the allure of the avocation lies,
for the select few who find the true spirit of the art, in the very
element of doubt. One may lay down the wrong thing; it may never
achieve the quality of an antique. Who can tell?
For me, I put away, from time to time, such trifles as commend
themselves to my tried instinct. Just now, by way of illustration,
I am putting down a complete line of felt pennants such as the
travelling public loves to flaunt from burdened Fords—Brick Creek,
Iowa—Wappingers’ Falls—Keeseville and Ogunquit. These must, one
day, be seen as rare and lovely things; I give the hint for what it
may be worth. The pocket-flask, too—the still—the vanity-case—the
cigar-lighter—and the flower-holder with which the stately limousine
must be equipped—the photographs of screen divinities! It will not be
long before I shall unseal my bin of portraits where J. Warren Kerrigan
and Francis X. Bushman, autographed, await the questing antiquer’s
delighted eye.
[Illustration: PLATE III
FROM PROFESSOR KILGALLEN’s COLLECTION OF BEAUTIFUL OLD
WOOD-CARVINGS
Figure of Pocahontas; believed to be the work of John Alden
]
Only yesterday, I sold the last of my cigarette pictures. Della Fox! I
had a hundred of her, once. It seemed impossible for us Yonkers boys,
trading acutely in that fresh, delighted loveliness, that it could
ever be antique! I must have felt, intuitively, even then, that it
must be. Wanting that intuition, too, I would not have stored away the
thumbed installments of my nickel weeklies—those precious specimens
that one may view, now, under glass, on free days, at the Metropolitan
Museum of Antiques.
Time has done it. And time will do it again. Antiquer, antique, but
antique ahead!
————
HINTS FOR BUYING FROM
ORIGINAL SOURCES