For, with my own savings, one Christmas in the Arthur Period, I bought, as a gift to both parents in common, no less a treasure than a genuine Garfield toothpick-container—the miniature, in genuine pressed glass, of a silk hat, which, inverted, stood for a decade in the centre of our table on all occasions of state, and which, with its original content of toothpicks, including four showing signs of actual use, I reluctantly disposed of to the buyer for Queen Mary’s collection at a price which both modesty and my gentleman’s agreement forbid me to confess. It was only natural that I should react to the twin stimuli of inheritance and environment. My early days were spent in the constant and inspiring contemplation of articles of _vertu_ which the most discerning taste of the contemporary moment would not have recognized as even potentially antiques. I could not, indeed, enter our house without contemplating the statuettes of the Christian Slaves who knelt, one on each side of the steps, mutely supplicating the beholder’s piety and pity. If I would strike a sulphur match in the front hall, to light my way up the stairs to bed, I must do it on nothing less precious than a perfect specimen of the Benjamin Harrison match-holder—the peculiarly rare and exotic type, I mean, wherein a mother hen and a young chick are depicted, the mature fowl’s plumage being formed cunningly of colored sand-paper and the wee chickling being made to say, in a loop issuing from its open beaklet: “Don’t scratch me—scratch Mother.” This, even in those unappreciative days, was held far preferable to the alternative device, wherein a frowzy vagabond is illustrated, his raiment a mosaic of sand-paper fragments, with the legend: “Scratch your matches On my patches.” We possessed a number of these, in addition to the rarer article already described.