spoon from the Paris Exposition; the jade bracelet; and the silver
snuff-box that grandfather carried to the day of his death. If the
gazing visitor be a person of abandoned character he makes humourous
pretence that the householder has done wisely to turn a key upon these
treasures, against the ravishings of the overwhelmed and frenzied
connoisseur. He wears the look of one who is gnawed with envy, and he
heaves the sigh of despair.

But when he notes presently that he has ceased to be observed he sneaks
cheerfully to another part of the room.

The what-not is obsolete. The Empire cabinet is regnant. Yet, though
one is the lineal descendant of the other--its sophisticated
grandchild--they are hostile and irreconcilable.

Twenty years hence the cabinet will be proscribed and its contents
catalogued in those same terms of disparagement that the what-not
became long since too dead to incur. Both will then have attained the
state of honourable extinction now enjoyed by the dodo.

The what-not had curiously survived in the Bines home--survived unto
the coming of the princely cabinet--survived to give battle if it
might.

Here, perhaps, may be found the symbolic clue to the strife's cause.

The sole non-combatant was Mrs. Bines, the widow. A neutral was this
good woman, and a well-wisher to each faction.

"I tell you it's all the same to me," she declared, "Montana City or