I inherited, among other treasures, my father’s unusually well-preserved file of Police Gazettes, running back to that celebrated issue in which Lillian Russell’s portrait appeared for the first time. The man, simple and unpretentious as he was, possessed a true genius for preserving such memorabilia and discarding items of little or no value. These pink pages were his pride and treasure through dark days of stress and privation; he handled them reverently, even when they were fresh from the press, and insisted that those of his patrons who examined them should treat them with circumspection. Invariably, with the advent of a new issue, the previous one, tenderly smoothed and flattened, was laid away in the closet, to be bound when occasion permitted. Connoisseurs have told me that I erred in parting with this collection when I accepted the proposals of that prince of antiquers, Morton Fitz, in 1913. I realize that the file must inevitably have appreciated heavily in value with the passage of another decade, but I have no regrets. It was too difficult for me to look over those ageing pages without yielding to the weakness of tears. Eheu, fugaces ... not even in the recent era of display of certain anatomical details could the eye rest so happily on opulent, artless curves ... the flesh-tones, too, thanks to the happy selection of the paper, were poignantly realistic. I am not sorry that I parted with them all. I am, always, an antiquer ahead, and these had become antiques of the past. Ave, and farewell.
There must be an end even to the reminiscences of an antiquer. And my purpose, in this paper, has not been to excite a vain envy in the readers of the “Atlantic,”† but rather to invite them to antique, hereafter, in the hereafter, to espouse, if they will, that all-but-maiden fancy which has beguiled my leisured hours for twice two lustrums [forty years]. They, too, if they please, may be antiquers ahead instead of back.
————
† This essay, with others of Mr. Twitchett’s charming papers, inevitably first saw the light in the periodical which, most happily, reflects the spirit of the antiquer.
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.
Plate II
MAGNIFICENT OLD FLAT-FRONT EARLY NEW JERSEY SIDEBOARD DISCOVERED BY PROFESSOR KILGALLEN IN AN OBSCURE PART OF NEWARK
Inevitably, I was taken in the act. My father found me fondling my relic and took it roughly from me.