“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. Armed with this saw, I went round sawing things, or rather trying to. I could not exactly saw with it, but I could haggle the edges and corners of wood, producing a gnawed, frazzled effect. My quest for stuff suitable to exercise my handicraft on led me into the spare, or company room, where I found material to my liking. I was raking away at the legs of a rosewood center table--had one leg pretty well damaged to my liking and was preparing to start on another--when some officious grown person happened in on me and stopped me with violent words. If I had but been left undisturbed for half an hour or so I doubtless would have achieved a result which now after a lapse of thirty-odd years would have thrilled a lover of antiques to the core of his being. But this was not to be. My present recollection of the incident is that I was chided in a painful physical way. The latter-day system of inculcating lessons in the mind of the child according to a printed form chart of soothing words was not known in our community at that time. The old-fashioned method of using the back of a hairbrush and imparting the lesson at the other end of the child from where the mind is and letting it travel all the way through him was employed. I was then ordered to go outdoors where there would be fewer opportunities for engaging in what adults mistakenly called mischief.