pretensions and was very, very old, Elizabethan, I should think,
although it had been refronted with a horrible stucco to suit modern
tastes. The oak staircase was good though narrow, and led to numerous
small rooms upon two floors above, some of which rooms were panelled
and had oak beams, now whitewashed like the panelling--at least they had
once been whitewashed, probably in the last generation.

These rooms were literally crammed with every sort of old furniture,
most of it decrepit, though for many of the articles dealers would have
given a good price. But at dealers Mr. Potts drew the line; not one of
them had ever set a foot upon that oaken stair. To the attics the place
was filled with this furniture and other articles such as books, china,
samplers with the glass broken, and I know not what besides, piled in
heaps upon the floor. Indeed where Mr. Potts slept was a mystery; either
it must have been under the counter in his shop, or perhaps at nights he
inhabited a worm-eaten Jacobean bedstead which stood in an attic, for
I observed a kind of pathway to it running through a number of legless
chairs, also some dirty blankets between the moth-riddled curtains.

Not far from this bedstead, propped in an intoxicated way against the
sloping wall of the old house, stood the clock which I desired. It was
one of the first "regulator" clocks with a wooden pendulum, used by the
maker himself to check the time-keeping of all his other clocks, and
enclosed in a chaste and perfect mahogany case of the very best style of
its period. So beautiful was it, indeed, that it had been an instance of
"love at first sight" between us, and although there was an estrangement
on the matter of settlements, or in other words over the question of
price, now I felt that never more could that clock and I be parted.

So I agreed to give old Potts the £20 or, to be accurate, £18 14s. which