This paper is a memento of the remarkable house of a remarkable man--Timothy Dexter, an eighteenth century leather merchant of Massachusetts, whose earnings, invested through advice conveyed to him in dreams, brought him a fortune. With this he was able to gratify his unique tastes in material luxuries. His house at Newburyport was filled with preposterous French furniture and second-rate paintings. On the roof were minarets decorated with a profusion of gold balls. In front of the house he placed rows of columns, some fifteen feet in height, surmounted by heroic wooden figures of famous men. As his taste in great men changed he would have the attire and features of some statue modified, so that General Morgan might one day find himself posing as Bonaparte. On a Roman circle before the entrance stood his permanent hero, Washington, supported on the left by Jefferson, on the right by Adams, who was obliged to stand uncovered in all weathers, to suit Timothy's ideas of the respect due to General Washington. Four roaring wooden lions guarded this Pantheon, and the figures were still standing when the great gale of 1815 visited Newburyport. Then the majority fell. The rest were sold for a song, and were scattered, serving as weather vanes and tavern signs. Timothy Dexter wrote one book, which is now deservedly rare. This was _A Pickle for the Knowing Ones_, of which he published at least two editions. In this book he spoke his mind on all subjects; his biographer, Samuel L. Knapp, calls it "a Galamathus of all the saws, shreds, and patches that ever entered the head of a motley fool, with items of his own history and family difficulties." His vanity, literary style and orthography may be seen in his assertion: "Ime the first Lord in the Younited States of Amercary, now of Newburyport. It is the voice of the peopel and I cant Help it." To the second edition of his _Pickle_ he appended this paragraph: "Mister Printer the knowing ones complane of my book the first edition had no stops I put in A Nuf here and they may peper and solt it as they plese." A collection of quotation marks, or "stops" followed. "Lord Dexter," as he called himself and was called by one Jonathan Plummer, a parasitic versifier who chanted doggerel in his praise, was a picturesque character enough, and we are glad to have his memory kept green by these few remaining bits of paper from his walls. [Illustration] VI REVIVAL AND RESTORATION OF OLD PAPERS [Illustration] VI REVIVAL AND RESTORATION OF OLD PAPERS It was in 1880 that Clarence Cook said: "One can hardly estimate the courage it would take to own that one liked an old-fashioned paper." How strange that sounds now, in 1905, when all the best manufacturers and sellers of wall-papers are reproducing the very old designs, for which they find a ready sale among the most fastidious searchers for the beautiful. One noted importer writes me: