the subject. However, here is your cue. Let us suppose you need, or
want, a desk--an antique desk. Go about from one dealer to the other
until you find the very piece you have dreamed of; one that gives
pleasure to you, as well as to the dealer. Then take an experienced
friend to look at it. If you have every reason to suppose that the
desk is genuine, buy it. Next, read up on the furniture of the
particular period to which your desk belongs, in as serious a manner
as you do when you buy a prize dog at the show. Now you have made an
intelligent beginning as a collector. Reading informs you, but you
must buy old furniture to be educated on that subject. Be eternally on
the lookout; the really good pieces, veritable antiques, are rare;
most of them are in museums, in private collections or in the hands of
the most expensive dealers. I refer to those unique pieces, many of
them signed by the maker and in perfect condition because during all
their existence they have been jealously preserved, often by the very
family and in the very house for which they were made. Our chances for
picking up antiques are reduced to pieces which on account of reversed
circumstances have been turned out of house and home, and, as with
human wanderers, much jolting about has told upon them. Most of these
are fortified in various directions, but they are treasures all the
same, and have a beauty value in line colour and workmanship and a
wonderful fitness for the purposes for which they were intended.

"Surely we are many men of many minds!"


PLATE V

The sofa large, strong and luxuriously comfortable; the curtains
simple, durable and masculine in gender. The tapestry and