The inspiring example of Milton Kilgallen, and the indisputable success of his endeavors, have, together, persuaded me that I have been even more at fault than those esoteric antiquers, if I may, for the last time, so describe them, toward whom, in the pride of my peculiarity, I have felt and spoken very much as they, in turn, have felt and spoken of the Philistine proper. For years, sedulously and vigilantly I have enjoyed a monopoly of the great branch of the art and science of antiqueing which continues to preoccupy my powers. I have made no effort to interest other antiquers in my province; I have thought of them, indeed, as scarcely less pitiable than those to whom an antique is a piece of, in the vulgar idiom, junk. Too, even had I felt a need of sympathy and envy and applause in my secret ambitions and achievements, I should have been restrained from the essay to share my enthusiasm by my fixed belief that it could be acquired in no way except that accident of inheritance by which it came to me. _Peccavi_, or, in the perhaps more pungent idiom of Cicero, I have sinned. I now make confession and, as far as may be, atonement. I reveal my guarded secrets, at last, without reserve. I am still, I believe, the only antiquer ahead, _sui generis_, or, to adopt the scintillating Italian phrase, alone in my class. Rather, now that these lines have seen the light, _fui_, _non sum_. I have been, as the Latins put it, not I am. For it will be enough to whisper my revelations; there will be, to-morrow, I realize, more antiquers ahead than one can shake a stick—if the reader will indulge me in the solecism of ending a sentence prepositionally—at. To this I am resigned. Long enough have I enjoyed the sole entry to an entire tense; long enough have brother and sister antiquers rummaged in the traditional and commonplace haunts of the antique, the past; long enough have they ventured no farther than the abode of the antiquer—the present. To-morrow, forsaking these well-trodden precincts, they will join me in the virgin, but pregnant, future. Like me, they will stoop no longer to the facile, shameful processes of searching, in cobwebbed bins and attics, for antiques which any novice must recognize, at a glance, as old. Like me, they will even smile at the enthusiasms of those who scratch in the dust and crow, like barnyard fowl, at each inevitable discovery. Like me, they will know the pure joy of explorations and discoveries among the boundless stores of to-morrow’s antiques. I must begin at the beginning, with my birth. My destiny was predetermined by the ancestry of which I sprang. My parents, both of sturdy native stock, were by instinct mated to produce the original antiquer ahead. It was inevitable, I apprehend. It was to be. It was.