This wood can be finished to show an exquisite wavy pattern or curly veins--“tiger citrus,” “panther citrus,” or “peacock-tail citrus”--the experts call the varieties. Over really fine specimens true connoisseurs go into ecstasies, and fortunes can be wasted. A table somewhat larger than Calvus’s has been known to sell for 500,000 sesterces ($20,000); and there is a record price of twice that figure. The tables in the present mansion are nowhere nearly so valuable; yet they are among the most precious objects in the house. If there is a fire, they will be rescued almost before anything else, always barring the waxen _imagines_. =44. Chests, Cabinets, Water Clocks, and Curios.=--Of course there are many other articles of furniture like the great _arca_, the master’s strong box in the tablinum; heavily locked and riveted down upon the stone beneath. There are the elegant tall candelabra, of bronze or even of silver, elaborately ornamented and swinging at night with such batteries of olive-oil lamps as to make the marbles, frescos, and mosaics give back an alluring glitter. There is the water clock in the peristylium, a kind of glorified hour-glass, so adjusted as to record small fractions of time, and beside which a special slave usually stands all day long to call off the passage of each hour to the family. There are great cabinets, chests, and cupboards full of plate, fine blankets, and extremely elaborate wardrobes. In addition to all these upon a kind of sideboard there stand forth real or alleged objects of value or antiquity, a silver cup taken at the capture of Syracuse; a tall black and red vase signed by the master potter Callisthenes; and a statuette of a dancing girl which is probably a true work of Lysippus. Conspicuous, too, is a silver bowl, battered and discolored, and of extreme simplicity. Mock it not, however, it is “the ancestral salt cellar” (as remarks Horace), the one silver dish possessed by the good old Calvi, when in all the Roman Senate there was only a single complete silver dinner service to be exchanged from house to house when high officials entertained ambassadors.