As I was loading them on the team to take them away, kindly old Mr. Whipplefish stood in the doorway of the historic old Whipplefish house, waving a partly empty bottle around his head and crooning an old Cape Cod melody to me by way of farewell. Unfortunately, in the middle of the song, the bottle struck the side of the doorway. The house, weakened by the many removals, at once collapsed, burying Mr. Whipplefish in the remains. July is the busy season on Cape Cod; and since it was supposed that Mr. Whipplefish had been killed, no effort was made to dig him out on that day. On the following morning, however, he was heard crying for more gin; so a number of natives rather reluctantly desisted from their regular summer occupation of relieving the summer visitor of his bank-roll, and dug him out. He was little the worse for wear, for he had shielded the partly filled gin bottle with his body as the house caved in on him, and the stimulant had eased the trying hours. This, however, was not the end of the old Whipplefish house. A few months after the collapse a retired harness manufacturer from Rochester, New York, who was travelling on Cape Cod in search of the antique and the quaint, passed the ruins of the old Elon D. Whipplefish house, lying amidst the pine trees, poplars, stinkbush and cranberries. As I have said before, persistence is at the root of all successful antiqueing. W——, the retired harness manufacturer, for some unknown reason made up his mind that he wished to restore the Elon D. Whipplefish house to the exact state in which it was before its collapse. [Illustration: PLATE V RARE BIT OF OLD WORCESTERSHIRE WARE Table ornament collected by Professor Kilgallen. The little circles are all in gilt. ] Under his guiding hand and bank-roll it rose again amid the poplars, pines, and stinkbush. All Cape Cod yielded up its treasures to him, and almost every family on the Cape enriched itself from the Bright fortune. If they didn’t have genuine antiques to sell him, they manufactured them. To-day the Elon D. Whipplefish house stands in Sunkset, a monument to Isaiah Thrasher and the Marjoribank family from whom he descended. W—— paid Elon D. Whipplefish three thousand dollars for the lot and the ruins; and with this money Elon bought into a nice two-masted schooner. He went into the business of running rum up from the Bahamas; and when he saw the stuff that goes into the bottles that he sold, he went on the water-wagon. In a little over a year’s time he became a wealthy man, and bought a house on Mount Vernon Street in Boston, where he could be near the movies and the atmosphere from which his distant ancestor, Isaiah Thrasher, had fled in 1742. ———— OLD RUGS, OLD IRON OLD BRASS, OLD GLASS A Brief Brochure on the Search For the Antique