Buying and collecting - Seventeenth-century Oak - Suggestions for a dining room - A composite sideboard - A Jacobean side table, chairs and accessories - Eighteenth-century English - Bookcases - Points for consideration - The inadvisability of old chairs for dining-room use - Library Furniture - Suggestions for bedrooms - Comparison between old and new marqueterie - French Reproductions - Buying on a Warranty - Value of a correct invoice - The Bargain Hunter - An amusing instance of the biter bit - The Dealers - Remarks upon the dealers - Buying at Auction - Watching sales - Buying on commission - Best method of making a collection.

THE following suggestions are written as the result of more than thirty years' experience, with the hope that they may be of some service to amateurs of old furniture. Where an opinion is expressed which bears upon legal matters, such views as are given, must be taken, not as those of an amateur lawyer, but simply as the conclusion arrived at after listening to many summings-up and decisions by judge and jury, in some of the numerous cases in which it has been my lot to attend as expert witness.

In the chapter on "faked" furniture a few of the many pitfalls for the unwary, have been commented upon, and if the reader will accept this chapter as connected with the preceding one it will be unnecessary to go over much of the same ground.

The "collector" of old furniture is scarcely the correct description of a person who likes to buy it, because very few have houses which are roomy enough to contain a sufficient number of specimens of any particular kind, to deserve the name of a collection. Examples of different ceramic factories may be held in some half-a-dozen cabinets, which, may consist of some fifty different kinds, and perhaps five hundred various specimens, but there can be no corresponding assemblage of furniture, without a huge mansion to accommodate it.

I will assume for the purpose of these notes that the reader has the wish to have a dining-room furnished with seventeenth-century oak, a library of eighteenth-century mahogany, a drawing-room of either French or English work, with a mixture of personally collected items found in his journeyings at home and abroad, and that instead of the bedroom suites "as advertised," he prefers to equip his various bedrooms with sound old English chests of drawers, "tall-boys," wardrobes, and corresponding accessories. This arrangement can be varied to suit particular tastes, but my notes will serve as well.