Thus I began, equipped by lavish Nature as if to recompense in me the leanness of my paternal lot. Our house, long before I grew to trouserable age, was filled to flowing with such a collection as not even the indefatigable burrowings of the ineffable Rapp and Heller could, in these degenerate times, assemble. In the parlor—incredible as it may sound—stood, not one, but two Ulysses Grant cuspidors, one nicked a trifle, but the other flawless—the priceless forget-me-notted Grants, I mean, not the relatively common gilt-edged type. They were even then my father’s chiefest pride; I—gratified in other boyish whims—was never suffered to use either of them except by stealth. He treasured them, born antiquer that he was, undreaming that the pair would one day yield his son a thousand-fold their modest cost. I owe him for them; my mother, herself no less percipient in other lines than he, would have discarded them when, after the unforgetable visit of Moody and Sankey, my father forewent his self-indulgence in tobacco; but his taste was true. He clung to them with a dogged, blind attachment for which I bless him still. [Illustration: PAIR OF WONDERFUL OLD FRENCH STATUETTES NOW THE PROPERTY OF DR. TWITCHETT The owner has identified them as Sèvres and pronounces them portrait statuettes—No. 1, Victor Hugo in one of his moods; and No. 2, a certain Marquis de St. Quai, probably a patron of Victor Hugo. ] It was my mother who provided me with my inheritance of _objets-d’art_, or, as my Parisian friends prefer to say, objects of art. In its way her instinct was as infallible as my father’s own, though possibly more limited in scope. Indefatigably she scrimped and saved to bring together the nucleus of my subsequent collection. It would be cruel, in the present era of inflation, to set forth the catalogue. My estimable colleague Van Loot, forewarned as he is, would not survive the list, even if I omitted the prices, but I owe her memory at least the tribute of some little particularity in the connection. It was she who far-sightedly sacrificed our Thanksgiving turkey to procure the figures of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, obtainable then, in the admirable porcelain work of the period, for the trifling sum of three dollars each, and even urged upon the buyer at that price by the agent of the pious firm which held the monopoly of their production. My mother, I remember, shrewdly beat him down to $2.75, and exacted that ten cents of this sum should be paid in trade at my father’s shop—the agent happily requiring his professional attention at the moment.