Old things of all description may lose their value and desirability to their temporary owners, but never to the world. Nothing disappears completely. The smallest piece of tissue paper that has served as a wrapper for an orange and is swept along the sidewalk by a stray wind will ultimately be gathered by some one and again put to some use. Objects which find their way through the back door of a Fifth Avenue mansion into a rubbish wagon and are carried away will re-appear in some flat of a tenement house as a new and welcome addition to somebody’s comfort. Articles discarded in tenement house dwellings and sold for a few pennies to a ragman are triumphantly brought into the reception room of a patrician mansion, treasured by the new owners, and admired by his friends. Curious and extraordinary are the fortunes of old objects on their way to a new proprietor with whom they will stay for a while, and their wanderings are eternal. Old things in New York are sold in magnificent establishments on Fifth Avenue, and they are sold in dungeons on the Bowery. Some people are so poor that they have to buy “second-hand things” to furnish their homes and clothe their bodies. Others are so rich that they are compelled to buy antiques in order to possess something unique. But the men who deal in old things, whose chosen calling it is to buy and to sell antiques and second-hand wares are the true adventurers among the business men of New York. No matter whether their finger nails and manners are polished and they entertain prospective buyers in luxurious display rooms, or, whether they walk in tenement house districts from door to door, ready to buy anything and everything, or whether they wait for customers in their stuffy shops on Park Row or Baxter Street; they all possess the hope that some day they will make _the_ find, and buy for a song something they will be able to sell for a large amount. Not money but the game of hunting after the unexpected, and the thrill in finding it, constitute the lure that attracts the seeker after old things. The Poor Man’s Hunting Ground There are many people on the streets of New York taken for granted without further question. Have you ever seen early in the morning when people sit around the breakfast table, a cleanly dressed man, with wrapping paper and cord under his arms, walking in the roadway, looking up at the windows of private houses and ejaculating every five or ten paces some inarticulate noises? If you lean out of the window and watch him you will see him disappear into some of the houses, and if you wait for his reappearance you will notice that his wrapping paper has now become a bundle. “Cash-Clothes! Cash-Clothes!” Untiringly he cries out these two words at the people who dwell in the houses he passes. Servants frequently answer the call of “cash-clothes” and let the man in through the back door as a welcome buyer of discarded wearing apparel of their masters and mistresses.