What if there is the risk of their being broken! A rivet here, a rivet there will make them speak again. I have a Spode milk-jug with forty-five rivets in it and it is more eloquent to me than all the modern china you could find, however perfect it may be. In fact, I would sooner have a piece that has been mended. It shows that in those long-ago days, where all romance lies hiding for us now, it shows that they cared for their treasures and would not let them be discarded because they happened upon evil times. I have also an old blue and white tea-pot with a silver spout. A dealer sniffed at it the other day.
“May have been good once,” said he.
“’Tis better now,” said I. “So would you and I be if we’d been through the wars.”
“Do you mean to say you’d prefer me with a wooden arm?” he asked.
“I would,” said I. “You’d be a better man. You couldn’t grasp so much.”
But the other day I found a treasure. Miss B——, the old spinster lady in whose farm I have my little dwelling, is by way of being the reincarnation of a jackdaw. She has cupboards and chests in every room in which lie hidden a thousand old things which have been in her family for years. Yesterday, in turning out an old drawer, I came across a quaint little contrivance that looked like a string bag, only it was beautifully made in three parts, all composed of a wonderful lace-work of fine string and knitted together, each one by a delicate stitching of white horsehair.
I brought it out into the kitchen, tenderly in my hand.
“Whatever is this?” I asked.
She took it in her fingers and looked at it for a moment, then, inconsequently, she laid it down upon the kitchen table.
“That—” said she, “that was my great, great grandmother’s bonnet. She wore it up till the time she died.”