We compromised at forty. It was a triumph rather for my family than for me, for my mother expropriated the cash before I could escape, and subsequently invested it, happily for me, on a mustache-cup dutifully gilt-lettered “Father,” a small bone carved in the crude semblance of a human hand and attached to a long slender rod [an instrument employed, as all antiquers know, in the day of red-flannel underwear, for the comforting purpose of scratching an itching back without the tiresome routine of removing clothes], and a pottery sculpture of a pug-dog, which articles, ripened into antiques by the amiable, intervening years, yielded me some thousands per centum on the investment. But the episode was far more significant than it seemed, in its effect upon my life. Forty dollars was the price current of a sow-scraper. I consulted my father, cannily. They had been made, it appeared, by the local smith, at a uniform price of twenty-five cents. His memory is accurate. Informed of the transaction he used emphatic speech in regretting his failure to lay in a stock, in the days of plenty. It would have paid better, he averred, than barbering for Jay Gould himself, or curling Ferd Ward’s own whiskers! From that day I was a blooded antiquer ahead. I have no passion for the merely old; it would be as unexciting, for me, to delve and seek for treasure in dusty corners, after the habit of the commonplace antiquer, as to angle for goldfish in a glass bowl. I play the nobler game. I antique, not in yesterday, but in to-morrow. Ah, the fascination of it! The intoxication of tearing the veil from the inscrutable hereafter, the blood-quickening element of risk, as one selects and stores away the antiques of to-morrow-years, against the day of rarity and famine! Ah, the triumph of a well-stocked bin, sealed till the day of reckoning! I have enjoyed these delights alone; I share them, now, with those who have the soul to follow in my steps. Since the closing days of the first Cleveland Period, I have systematically antiqued ahead, privately, unadvertised, secretly exulting. Even now, those earlier bins and cupboards have begun to justify my penetrating choice. Who, of all the unthinking thousands who beheld the wired bustle in its heyday, thought to preserve a full dozen against to-day? Who, but Eben S. Twitchett, ridiculed as a crank and a fanatic by his neighbors, unhonored and unsung by myopic antiquers, the prey of dealers in alley trash?