My father, worthy fellow, had no clear knowledge of his natural talent. My mother, I sometimes fancy, was remotely, dimly conscious of her gift. I can recall, as yesterday, the exalted look with which she witnessed the removal, from our stately parlor, of the array of commonplace antiques with which it had been furnished, the joy with which she and my father arranged, instead, those potential antiques which only the gropings of their common hunger recognized for what they were. Even I, then in plaid kilts, did not at once share their delight, their understanding. I found the red plush surface of that priceless varnished oak sofa a harshly ticklesome affair; I was, to be sure, impressed by the new frosted globes adorning the gasolier, the intricate arabesques of the plaster rosette on the ceiling, from which it sprouted downwards; I need not say, surely, that these globes, tinted a glorious winey purple, decorated with protuberant knobs and profound depressions, were none other than those very treasures of the Obenchain collection, famous in four hemispheres as the sole surviving set of admitted Roscoe Conkling gas-glass. They were, and I must marvel helplessly before the phenomenon of instinct which urged my father, a simple-minded barber in the town of Yonkers, to choose, unerringly, for the tastes of fifty years beyond! His taste, untutored by any device of art, was all but infallible. He left me this, and with it the store of masterpieces which have, discreetly vended, placed me beyond the reach of that financial anxiety which, especially after the invention of the safety razor, clouded his declining days. My unhappy father! It was his lot to begin his profession in the full flower of the Whisker Period, and to survive those troubled years only to confront the ignoble age of the tubed cream and the tame, inglorious two-edged blade. It is impossible for me to think of him save with a filial tear, and yet how cheerful he was! How his place of business invited and allured the intellectual society of Yonkers of his day! How the racked, lettered mugs gleamed in the gas-lights! And how the air, of a Saturday night, was gay with innocent mirth and pungent anecdote!