Now, to take up my own specialties (if I may call them so), I have the temerity to assume that my long experience in securing and handling these has possibly given me a little knowledge that may be of use to the amateur collector. I do not claim too much, perhaps, when I state that hooked rugs and early American iron and glass were familiar items in my possession long before the present craze for collecting them came to rage so wildly and widely. I have had exquisite hooked rugs, and rare fragments of such rugs, for instance, as far back as 1886. American glass has always been a passion (if I may use the word) with me. In fact, among my friends and relatives, my search for really good glass has made me almost something of a by-word, jocularly speaking. The reader will easily connote that what I consider good glass is not a thing to be found every day in the week and that I am somewhat particular in my taste. Well, I confess it, and to substantiate the confession perhaps I should essay some description of what I mean by “really good glass.” Glass, to be perfect in my eyes, should be absolutely in the condition in which it left the retailer who sold it to the private purchaser. I am aware that broken, cracked, or partially decomposed pieces have some value to the beginner, and I myself do often handle them, as a dealer, it is true. But it is sound glass that has kept me so diligently on the search day after day, year after year. Sandwich and Stiegel I leave to the beginner who likes to pay $17 for a ruby finger-bowl that was a drug on the market at two-for-a-quarter five years ago; who gladly signs a check for $125 in exchange for a dozen Benjamin Franklin cup-plates regularly turned out at the Sandwich factory for thirty cents a dozen, up to the time when the strike closed production in General Benjamin Harrison’s administration; but for myself—well, even a quaint old Colonial Sandwich lamp chimney, manufactured during Grover Cleveland’s first term, or as far back as the supremacy of Chester A. Arthur, does not excite me. A friend of mine proudly exhibits a lamp chimney said to have been persistently mistaken for a spy-glass by Lafayette himself on a Christmas Eve, on the occasion when he was so well entertained by the citizens of Yonkers, during his second visit to this country. I have never made the slightest effort to obtain this bit.