The shops start in the expensive shopping districts with the large, impressive, brightly lighted establishments where important-looking salesmen remove individual treasures from safes and cupboards, exhibit them proudly and learnedly, and quote prices on them that cause a pale green flush to steal over the face of the unsuspecting quester after antiques. They end in the little side streets with small dark shops smelling of a peculiar blend of cheese-rind, fish-glue and unfinished subways, in which the pallid proprietors wait with old-world patience for customers to come and fight indefinitely to get a four-dollar article reduced to sixty-five cents. The latter shops, of course, are of the greatest importance to the itinerant or catch-as-catch-can antique-hunters; for it is only in them that one stumbles on something rare and costly that has lain hidden in a shop-corner, regarded by the shopkeeper as a mere piece of junk—something, for example, like one of Marie Antoinette’s crown jewels or a piece of genuine fifteenth-century arras tapestry or one of Henry the Eighth’s marriage certificates or a coal scuttle which was used by Madame du Barry—something that can be bought for a dollar and a quarter and sold for ten thousand. It is scarcely necessary to point out that the antique-dealer is usually thoroughly conversant with the value of his possessions, that being his chief business in life. Still, he sometimes makes a mistake, as do such highly respected oracles as Senator William E. Borah, David Lloyd George, and Benito Mussolini; and it should be the aim of every true antique-hunter to encourage him to make all that he can. Wherever one moves about in European antique-circles, one is apt to hear the story of the helpless amateur who stumbled into a Marseilles antique-shop and bought an amber necklace for twenty-five dollars. When he got it home, he took it to a large jewelry shop to have it valued. The jeweler, after examining each bead with great care, offered its owner a thousand dollars for it. This aroused the owner’s suspicions, so he took the beads to an expert and thereupon learned that each bead was engraved _N à J_ in very small letters, and that it was a string that Napoleon had given to Madame Pompadour as a little token of his esteem. Some of those who tell the story declare that the lucky owner sold the beads for ten thousand dollars. Others say that he sold them for twenty-five thousand dollars. The most enthusiastic antiquers claim that he received fifty thousand for the string. But a little matter of fifteen or twenty-five thousand dollars should be nothing to amateurs in antiques, especially when such sums are merely matters of conversation and cost the converser nothing at all.