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ANTIQUEING AHEAD, BY EBEN S. TWITCHETT, B.B.S., F.A.A.P.A., ETC. 1

HINTS FOR BUYING FROM ORIGINAL SOURCES, BY CECILIA LEFINGWELL PRYNNE 29

THE SECRET OF SUCCESS, BY MURGATROYD ELPHINSTONE, A.B., A.M., F.R.F.H.A., LECTURER ON SCROLLWORK AND FRETS AT SINSABAUGH UNIVERSITY, 1917-18 39

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. 61

THE EUROPEAN FIELD, BY PROFESSOR CHARLES A. DOOLITTLE, F.R.A.C.S. 77

HORSECHESTNUT 113

A WORD ON POONING, BY AUGUSTULA THOMAS 133

PLATE I: OLD DUTCH OVENSIDE CHAIR WITH THE RARE PRETZEL BACK 4

PAIR OF WONDERFUL OLD FRENCH STATUETTES NOW THE PROPERTY OF DR. TWITCHETT 10

PLATE II: MAGNIFICENT OLD FLAT-FRONT EARLY NEW JERSEY SIDEBOARD DISCOVERED BY PROFESSOR KILGALLEN IN AN OBSCURE PART OF NEWARK 18

OLD NEW ENGLAND PRINT OF THE FIRST MEETING OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY FOR THE POPULARIZATION OF ANTIQUITIES 32

STATUE ERECTED TO PROFESSOR KILGALLEN IN FLORAL PARK CITY, FLORIDA, BY GRATEFUL CITIZENS OF THAT COMMUNITY 42

PLATE IV: PRICELESS BIT OF OLD STAFFORDSHIRE WARE COLLECTED BY PROFESSOR KILGALLEN 50

PLATE V: RARE BIT OF OLD WORCESTERSHIRE WARE 58

DR. TWITCHETT AND MRS. AUGUSTULA THOMAS'S HUSBAND WEARING THE INSIGNIA OF FULL MEMBERS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY FOR THE POPULARIZATION OF ANTIQUITIES 64

THE GLASS PERFECT 68

PLATE VI: OLD SKIPWORTH WARE: DOG ON PAPER-WEIGHT 74

PLATE X: NEW DESIGN FOR COLOGNE CATHEDRAL 94

THE PORTE-CHAPEAUX OF NOISETTE ? CHEVAL: "RISING IN THE NIGHT, TROUBLE OVER THE YEARNING OF THE BASSINES TO BE REUNITED TO THEIR ORIGINAL SOURCE" 124

"HE KNEW THE OLD MUSICIAN SUFFERED FROM HEADACHES," ETC. 126

THE BECKET 128

PROFILE VIEW OF THE PORTE-CHAPEAUX OF NOISETTE ? CHEVAL RECONSTRUCTED AND IN USE 130

RECEPTION HELD BY THE AMERICAN ACADEMY FOR THE POPULARIZATION OF ANTIQUITIES ON THE LAWN BEFORE THE ACADEMY'S BUILDING AT THE SAN FRANCISCO EXPOSITION 136

OLD VIRGINIA FOUR-POSTER INLAID WITH MAHOGANY 144

ANTIQUEING AHEAD

EBEN S. TWITCHETT, B.B.S., F.A.A.P.A., ETC.

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 that way.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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."

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