28 
House & Garden 
DO ANTIQUES FEEL HOMESICK? 
Their Romantic Past Lays a Burden of Responsibility and Respect Upon the New Purchaser 
P AUSING before the windows of the Antiquity Shopkeeper’s we 
often wonder, as Omar Khayyam wondered about quite a differ¬ 
ent set of venders, what they buy “one-half so precious as the 
stuff they sell.” Some of the things are not valuable, of course, but 
even then they have been part of family life, part of romance, part of 
history, perhaps, and just a little of their old atmosphere must hang 
about them. 
That rather ugly bead bell-pull, for instance, will have been touched 
by trembling fingers as Angelina parted forever from Edwin in some 
mid-Victorian drawing-room and signified to her Abigail, waiting in 
a black and white marble paved hall, that the front door was to be 
opened for the last time to him. 
Those quaint, hideous candle-sticks, made to represent male and 
female Moors in full gilt panoply holding aloft cascades of dangling 
glass, most probably stood side by side with great Southern shells and 
Northern whales’ teeth on the Best-Room mantel-piece of a coast-town 
cottage, and have seen the joyful meetings of wives with husbands newly 
returned from “going down to the sea in ships.” 
These old-fashioned, yellow ivory yam-winders on their carved 
stands must have turned and turned to the gentle hands of old ivory¬ 
faced grandmothers in warm, fire-lighted parlors, while they took 
“blind man’s holiday” and meditated upon the socks they had knitted 
for their children and were about to knit for the newer generation. 
T~^ O the people who part with their old things miss them properly? 
Do the people who acquire them really want them? 
Do they mean just bread-and-butter to the seller, and a caprice to the 
buyer? Does the former owner realize that a bit of himself and his 
ancestors goes with them,—or does he feel the loss of nothing beside 
the article? 
And does the new one understand that he has bought all sorts of 
home-memories with his purchases? That there are faces and faces, 
with the background of their familiar rooms, coming to him with his 
dim mirrors? That long library windows, overlooking sheltered 
lawns or brilliant flower-beds, form themselves behind his brown- 
stained globes? 
This little Chinese cabinet, black and gold lacquered, with its trays 
and its drawers, came from the celestial country, no doubt, what time 
Perry was opening Japan to an acquisitive world, and the young lieu¬ 
tenant who brought it back to his sister-in-law, also brought back the 
red and white carved chess-men under their glass dome. They prob¬ 
ably lived on a gold-and-brown chess table of their own in the corner 
near the conservatory door, and were considered too wonderful for 
ordinary use. Will the new master of them ever think how many 
childish noses have flattened themselves against that dome, while the 
eyes belonging to them saw the knights charging the elephants and 
castles? Perhaps he will let his own children play with them care¬ 
lessly, after he has brought them home and found his Mathilda dis¬ 
approved of them, and they will go down to shattered oblivion under 
the shock of battle with the tin soldiers and lead cannon of today. 
HP HERE is much to be said for preserving beautiful things; quaint, 
interesting, curious things; and if they are sold by people who do 
not value them to people who do, one likes to think of them flaunting 
their dignity of age and position among the new arrivals from modern 
places, happily appreciated. But if those who loved them were starved 
into selling them,—if the dealers bought cheap and intend to demand 
a terrible toll from people who will only buy because the price is high 
and the craze fashionable, then how much rather would we think of 
them as dying with the old rooms in the old houses they belonged to! 
Before we touched them brocades should hang in tatters on the walls of I 
the Italian palaces where their reflections had so rosily tinged white ( 
shoulders and thrown into fine relief so many proud, dark heads! The 
delicate, graceful French furniture,—chairs with their fine tapestry,— 
bureaus with their exquisite inlay, should dry-rot in their dear and 
slowly fading surroundings. Great pictures of great persons from the ! 
hands of the English Masters should cling to their oak panelling in 
the halls and galleries of the English country houses till both crumbled | 
together. 
To have intimate possessions of that kind, family appurtenances, and : 
personal acquisitions of the wise, or brave, or beautiful, or sweet, 
familiar people of our own race and to think of them in the houses of I 
strangers who only estimate them according to the money paid and the 
amount of satisfaction a new ego absorbs from ownership, is to wish we j 
had broken or burned them with our own hands! 
\AT E often wonder whether the altar laces, made by swift, pious 
fingers in sunny convent gardens, shrink when they take their 
places among hot eyes and bare arms at the modem dining table; the 1 
cool, old laces, with the scent of incense in every thread! Or how the i 
copes and chasubles, and church vestments generally, feel as they hang i - 
upon unclerical walls, or over civilian sofas, or even from the hand¬ 
some shoulders of lay persons, far distant from the solemn roll of the j 
organ and the high intoning of the Mass. Do they dream of the ! 
cathedral arches and the jewels of the colored windows there among 
the chairs and tables of the collecting citizen’s home? Or have* they ! 
no more memory of where they came from than he has? 
How do the old books like their new quarters on our shelves ? Many 
second-hand libraries are coming over the seas to us, and when we 
touch the mellow reds and dull greens of their smooth leather bindings 
and look at the names so elegantly written on the first pages,—the 
stilted little presentation sentences, the intimate affectionate words, or 
perhaps just the book-plate of the family founder from whom they 
came,—how can we help thinking that if ever}- volume does not go 
where it is honored, it had much better have mouldered comfortably 
away in its appointed niche in the carved bookcases, possibly beside 
those same long windows where the brown-stained globes had stood. 
Sometimes we. long to be like the Bride, in the “Mistletoe Bough” 
and, getting into our own oak chest, snap-to the lid and stuffily expire 
among our own goods and chattels rather than run the risk of being 
forced to sell them to friendly aliens. 
i 
A weather vane de¬ 
signed by Hunt 
Diederich for the 
residence of Robert 
W. Chauler 
