We did so. We came to a refectory table. Ordinarily a refectory table mainly differs in outline from the ordinary dining table by being constructed on the model of a dachshund. But this table, I should guess offhand, had seen about four centuries of good hard steady refecting at the hands of succeeding generations of careless but earnest feeders. Its top was chipped and marred by a million scars, more or less. Its legs were scored and worn down. Its seams gaped. From sheer weakness it canted far down to one side. The pressure of a hand upon it set the poor, slanted, crippled wreck to shaking as though along with all its other infirmities it had a touch of buck ague.
“What about this incurable invalid?” I asked. “Unless the fellow who buys it sends it up in a padded ambulance it'll be hard to get it home all in one piece. I suppose that makes it all the more valuable, eh?”
“Absolutely!” he said. “It's a perfectly marvelous thing! I figure it should bring at least six hundred dollars.”
“And cheap enough,” I said. “Why, it must have at least six hundred dollars' worth of things the matter with it. A good cabinet-maker could put in a nice busy month just patching—”
“You don't understand,” he said. “You surely wouldn't touch it?”
“I shouldn't dare to,” I said. “I was speaking of a regular cabinet-maker. No green hand should touch it—he'd have it all in chunks in no time.”
“But the main value of it lies in leaving it in its present shape,” he told me. “Don't you realize that this is a condition which could never be duplicated by a workman?”
“Well, I've seen some house wreckers in my time who could produce a pretty fair imitation,” I retorted playfully. I continued in a musing vein, for the sight of that hopelessly damaged wreck all worn down and dented in and slivered off had sent my mind backward to a memory of early childhood. I said:
“I can see now how my parents made a mistake in stopping me from doing something I tackled when I was not more than six years old. I was an antiquer, but I didn't know it and they didn't know it. They thought that I was damaging the furniture, when as a matter of fact in my happy, innocent, childish way I was adding touches to it which would have been worth considerable money by now.”
What I was thinking of was this: On my sixth birthday, I think it was, an uncle of mine for whom I was named gave me a toy tool chest containing a complete outfit of tools. There was a miniature hammer and a plane and a set of wooden vises and a gimlet and the rest of the things which belong in a carpenter's kit, but the prize of the entire collection to my way of thinking was a cross-cut saw measuring about eight inches from tip to tip.