Forty dollars was the price current of a sow-scraper. I consulted my father, cannily. They had been made, it appeared, by the local smith, at a uniform price of twenty-five cents. His memory is accurate. Informed of the transaction he used emphatic speech in regretting his failure to lay in a stock, in the days of plenty. It would have paid better, he averred, than barbering for Jay Gould himself, or curling Ferd Ward’s own whiskers!
From that day I was a blooded antiquer ahead. I have no passion for the merely old; it would be as unexciting, for me, to delve and seek for treasure in dusty corners, after the habit of the commonplace antiquer, as to angle for goldfish in a glass bowl. I play the nobler game. I antique, not in yesterday, but in to-morrow.
Ah, the fascination of it! The intoxication of tearing the veil from the inscrutable hereafter, the blood-quickening element of risk, as one selects and stores away the antiques of to-morrow-years, against the day of rarity and famine! Ah, the triumph of a well-stocked bin, sealed till the day of reckoning! I have enjoyed these delights alone; I share them, now, with those who have the soul to follow in my steps.
Since the closing days of the first Cleveland Period, I have systematically antiqued ahead, privately, unadvertised, secretly exulting. Even now, those earlier bins and cupboards have begun to justify my penetrating choice. Who, of all the unthinking thousands who beheld the wired bustle in its heyday, thought to preserve a full dozen against to-day? Who, but Eben S. Twitchett, ridiculed as a crank and a fanatic by his neighbors, unhonored and unsung by myopic antiquers, the prey of dealers in alley trash?
Who, but Eben S., had the forethought to store, in ample camphor, a perfect set of Harrison red flannels, and no less than six petticoats of the same material and date? Who, of all the gray-haired collectors who seek and cherish them to-day, but might have laid by as full a stock as mine of lapel-buttons [circa ’94] bearing the obsolete argot of the period—quip and jest which have all but lost their significance now? Or the buttons advertising bicycles—The Rambler and the Tribune—built with a truss—the Victor and Columbia and Pierce? Who had the wit and courage to store away the stereoscopes and the twin photographs that in them found perspective—priceless and unattainable to-day? The Chinese Tea Pickers? The Yellowstone? Brooklyn Bridge? Who boasts of these but Eben S. Twitchett, with his mid-ninety bin crammed to overflow with perfect specimens? Who stored the spun-glass trinkets of the Chicago Fair? Who, if he chose, might break the market in cylindrical phonograph records of “Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever”? Who, I ask, possesses one gross of American flags of the McKinley Period, each exquisitely inscribed with its “Remember the Maine—to hell with Spain”? Who can supply collectors with uncut, first edition pamphlet copies of the Great Cross of Gold oration, each with its rare Bryan print—that almost unobtainable portrait including hair?
The reader bears with my little pæan of triumph. These things are history, among antiquers of high degree and low and middle. But who, of all those who beat on Eben S. Twitchett’s doors to-day, who plead and supplicate for even a peep into the sealed bins of the Roosevelt Epoch, who, of all these, has the courage to antique, in this year 1923, for the antiquers of to-morrow?
Eben S. Twitchett has. Time, the great revealer, shall one day let in full light on the storerooms where his treasures are laid down, to-day as yesterday. What will Time see there? Ah, that is for each forward-looking antiquer to determine for himself. I cannot bring myself to share too many of my secrets, even now. And the true antiquer would regret a guidance too exact; the allure of the avocation lies, for the select few who find the true spirit of the art, in the very element of doubt. One may lay down the wrong thing; it may never achieve the quality of an antique. Who can tell?
For me, I put away, from time to time, such trifles as commend themselves to my tried instinct. Just now, by way of illustration, I am putting down a complete line of felt pennants such as the travelling public loves to flaunt from burdened Fords—Brick Creek, Iowa—Wappingers’ Falls—Keeseville and Ogunquit. These must, one day, be seen as rare and lovely things; I give the hint for what it may be worth. The pocket-flask, too—the still—the vanity-case—the cigar-lighter—and the flower-holder with which the stately limousine must be equipped—the photographs of screen divinities! It will not be long before I shall unseal my bin of portraits where J. Warren Kerrigan and Francis X. Bushman, autographed, await the questing antiquer’s delighted eye.
Plate III
