Table ornament collected by Professor Kilgallen. The little
circles are all in gilt.
]
Under his guiding hand and bank-roll it rose again amid the poplars,
pines, and stinkbush. All Cape Cod yielded up its treasures to him,
and almost every family on the Cape enriched itself from the Bright
fortune. If they didn’t have genuine antiques to sell him, they
manufactured them. To-day the Elon D. Whipplefish house stands in
Sunkset, a monument to Isaiah Thrasher and the Marjoribank family
from whom he descended.
W—— paid Elon D. Whipplefish three thousand dollars for the lot and the
ruins; and with this money Elon bought into a nice two-masted schooner.
He went into the business of running rum up from the Bahamas; and when
he saw the stuff that goes into the bottles that he sold, he went on
the water-wagon. In a little over a year’s time he became a wealthy
man, and bought a house on Mount Vernon Street in Boston, where he
could be near the movies and the atmosphere from which his distant
ancestor, Isaiah Thrasher, had fled in 1742.
————
OLD RUGS, OLD IRON
OLD BRASS, OLD GLASS
A Brief Brochure on the Search
For the Antique
By a Professional
JARED P. KILGALLEN
————
[Illustration]
OLD RUGS, OLD IRON
OLD BRASS, OLD GLASS
A Brief Brochure on the Search
For the Antique
By a Professional
JARED P. KILGALLEN, J.D. and R.P.
(_A Second-Cousin of Professor Kilgallen_)
The lure of the antique! Who is there that has not thrilled and flushed
at the words?
I confess at the outset: I am a collector and you may even call me
by that damning word “dealer,” too, if you choose, since, like all
non-amateur collectors, I part with items of my collection from time to
time; or, if you prefer to put it so, from day to day. No collection
is a permanency until it is established in an endowed museum: all
private collections are constantly in a state of fluctuation, or flux;
for the taste of the true collector is as constantly altering. Other
contingencies also affect collections. For instance, no collection of
Colonial utensils is safe from carelessness, and I have known a pair
of the virtually priceless old hand-wrought 1852 B-mark Brunswick
sheep-clippers to be thrown out upon an ash-heap by an Irish housemaid
under the impression that they were valueless even to herself. (I know
this because those very clippers formed a temporary part of my own
possessions immediately afterward.)
Every collector is aware also that after the visits of even the
best-introduced people almost any small article in a collection may
be missing; and under such circumstances the tracing of the lost item
may prove too embarrassing to be considered. My good friend, Dr. G——
R—— Vet. M.D. and Surg. of Erie, Pennsylvania, missed a valuable metal
medallion of President Rutherford B. Hayes (_circa_ ’78) in this way,
after the visit of a number of his wife’s relatives to the famous
old G—— R—— Manse at Erie. What is a collector to do in a case like
this, when a complaint might endanger actual estrangement? Dr. G—— R——
informed me himself that when he discovered his loss he thought the
matter over for some days and decided to say nothing about it.
[Illustration:
DR. TWITCHETT AND MME. AUGUSTULA THOMAS’S HUSBAND (MR. THOMAS)
WEARING THE INSIGNIA OF FULL MEMBERS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY FOR
THE POPULARIZATION OF ANTIQUITIES
]
Now, to take up my own specialties (if I may call them so), I have the
temerity to assume that my long experience in securing and handling
these has possibly given me a little knowledge that may be of use to
the amateur collector. I do not claim too much, perhaps, when I state
that hooked rugs and early American iron and glass were familiar items
in my possession long before the present craze for collecting them came
to rage so wildly and widely. I have had exquisite hooked rugs, and
rare fragments of such rugs, for instance, as far back as 1886.
American glass has always been a passion (if I may use the word) with
me. In fact, among my friends and relatives, my search for really good
glass has made me almost something of a by-word, jocularly speaking.
The reader will easily connote that what I consider good glass is
not a thing to be found every day in the week and that I am somewhat
particular in my taste. Well, I confess it, and to substantiate the
confession perhaps I should essay some description of what I mean by
“really good glass.”
Glass, to be perfect in my eyes, should be absolutely in the condition
in which it left the retailer who sold it to the private purchaser. I
am aware that broken, cracked, or partially decomposed pieces have some
value to the beginner, and I myself do often handle them, as a dealer,
it is true. But it is sound glass that has kept me so diligently on the
search day after day, year after year. Sandwich and Stiegel I leave
to the beginner who likes to pay $17 for a ruby finger-bowl that was
a drug on the market at two-for-a-quarter five years ago; who gladly
signs a check for $125 in exchange for a dozen Benjamin Franklin
cup-plates regularly turned out at the Sandwich factory for thirty
cents a dozen, up to the time when the strike closed production in
General Benjamin Harrison’s administration; but for myself—well, even a
quaint old Colonial Sandwich lamp chimney, manufactured during Grover
Cleveland’s first term, or as far back as the supremacy of Chester A.
Arthur, does not excite me. A friend of mine proudly exhibits a lamp
chimney said to have been persistently mistaken for a spy-glass by
Lafayette himself on a Christmas Eve, on the occasion when he was so
well entertained by the citizens of Yonkers, during his second visit
to this country. I have never made the slightest effort to obtain this
bit.
No. The perfect glass of my dreams—for I admit I am always dreaming
of it—the perfect glass of my dreams is a bit of plain glass, very
simple. It may be either pressed glass or moulded glass—I care not;
and it may be browned in the making, or clear; I am indifferent about
that. I do not even insist upon its antiquity, though the older it is
the better, of course; but what I do value is the state of preservation
in which I find it. That is to say, as I have already pointed out, a
specimen of glass, to be really worth while, should be precisely in the
condition in which it left the retailer’s shelf to pass to the original
purchaser’s possession, and, above all, THE ORIGINAL CONTENTS SHOULD BE
INTACT.
I admit that this is asking a great deal. It is more than one requires,
for instance, of seventeenth-century Venetian glass, or of old Bohemian
or of Bristol. Shall I be accused of jingoism when I say that I,
personally, have found perfection only in American glass? (A Hungarian
collector, now resident in this country, once asserted to me that he
had found a sample of Scotch glass in the state I hold to be really
worth while; but he was absolutely unwilling to show it, though I
made every effort to induce him; and I ended by doubting him.) I do
not claim that I have found worth-while glass frequently. Alas, no!
For though I have looked and looked and hoped and hoped for it during
many years, I have actually discovered but two perfect examples—only
two! The first (a superb thing from Kentucky) I found absolutely
by chance in the queerest, quaintest little place imaginable, up a
passageway behind a hotel, early in the morning after the election
of President Taft; and the second (not so pure, but nevertheless
wonderful) I discovered only last September, among some shrubberies
close to a summer mansion on the rugged coast of Massachusetts. What
these discoveries meant to me, only one who seeks with a like patient
enthusiasm could comprehend. I shall not describe my sensations; it is
enough to say that there are pleasures one must keep to one’s self. I
did not even speak of my discoveries at the time; but it may not be
out of place for me to say now that they made me very happy. Indeed,
after the second, I wandered for hours as in a dream, and even on the
following day, when I chanced to meet a friend, he passed me, and
then looked round over his shoulder at me for some time, all without
recognizing me.
[Illustration: