For the benefit of those who may not have had any advantages as recently and expensively enjoyed I will state that patina is the gloss or film which certain sorts of metal and certain sorts of polished woods acquire through age, long usage and wear. With the passage of time fabrics also may acquire it. You may have noticed it in connection with a pair of black diagonal trousers that had seen long and severe wear or on the elbows of summer-before-last's blue serge coat. However, patina in pants or on the braided seams of a presiding elder's Sunday suit is not so highly valued as when it occurs in relation to a Jacobean church pew or a William-and-Mary what-not. When I look back on my untutored state before we began to patronize the antique shops and the auction shops I am ashamed--honestly I am. The only excuse I can offer is based on the grounds of my earlier training. Like so many of my fellow countrymen, born and reared as I was in the crude raw atmosphere of interior America--anyhow, almost any wealthy New Yorker will tell you it is a crude raw atmosphere and not in any way to be compared with the refined atmosphere which is about the only thing you can get for nothing in Europe--as I say, brought up as I was amid such raw surroundings and from the cradle made the unconscious victim of this environment, I had an idea that when a person craved furniture he went for it to a regular furniture store having ice boxes and porch hammocks and unparalleled bargains in golden oak dining-room sets in the show windows, and there he made his selection and gave his order and paid a deposit down and the people at the shop sent it up to his house in a truck with historic scenes such as Washington Crossing the Delaware and Daniel in the Lions' Den painted on the sides of the truck, and after that he had nothing to worry about in connection with the transaction except the monthly installments. You see, I date back to the Rutherford B. Hayes period of American architecture and applied designing---a period which had a solid background of mid-Victorian influence with a trace of Philadelphia Centennial running through it, being bounded at the farther end by such sterling examples of parlor statuary as the popular pieces respectively entitled, “Welcoming the New Minister,” “Bringing Home the Bride,” and “Baby's First Bath,” and bounded at the nearer end by burnt-wood plaques and frames for family portraits with plush insets and hand-painted flowers on the moldings. By the conceptions of those primitive times nothing so set off the likeness of a departed great-aunt as a few red-plush insets.