———— ANTIQUEING AHEAD By EBEN S. TWITCHETT ———— [Illustration] ANTIQUEING AHEAD By EBEN S. TWITCHETT, B.B.S., F.A.A.P.A., ETC. It was Mr. Leslie Stephen, I believe, who remarked, of the repartees of the late Dr. Samuel Johnson, that it was futile to defend them except to those who enjoyed them without defense. Some color of this same good-humored contempt, this faintly supercilious _laissez-faire_ [or, as the French phrase has it, this spirit of leave it lay], has too long characterized the attitude of antiquers in general toward those who seem, to the esoteric view, at least, Philistine, gentile. Antiquers have, as a rule, contentedly held themselves above the indignity of proselyting; a little jealous, perhaps, of their relative rarity, they have looked askance, or two, even, at those who strayed, unbidden, into their company. It was, they felt, enough to be an antiquer and to antique; they knew no restless itch for converts; they believed, or affected to believe, that the antiquer is as impossible of post-natal evolution as the ventriloquist or the Ethiopian. Herein, as Professor Kilgallen has at last made manifest, antiquers have been doubly at fault—at fault in a parochial willingness to conserve for their own behoof an avocation at once innocent, diverting, and, if individual taste so incline, remunerative; at fault again in assuming that the antiquer must needs be born [in the vernacular] that way. These errors, happily, no longer reproach the confraternity at large. The popularization of antiqueing, under the purposeful leadership of Professor Kilgallen, is, one may assert, almost a _fait accompli_, or, as the clever Gallic dictum puts it, an accomplished fact. And it has been incidentally established, surely, that the antiquer may be made almost as expeditiously and convincingly as the antique itself. [Illustration: PLATE I OLD DUTCH OVENSIDE CHAIR WITH THE RARE PRETZEL BACK; PICKED UP IN A PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN SETTLEMENT BY PROFESSOR KILGALLEN Sketch by the Professor ]