Sometimes, as I look back over the long years, I am glad that when we went to housekeeping we, as the Man with the Duster would say, "were inconveniently poor." Otherwise I know what we should have done: we should have hastened to build, and lived to regret it; we should have filled our house with furniture which, in later days, would have been a remission of sins just to look at - debased, ungainly sleigh-front bureaus, the lower part of highboys bought under the ingenuous impression that they were lowboys, and many plates of the too-ubiquitous willow-pattern. We might have been comfortable, but we certainly should n't have been beautiful, and truly there is no bliss in ignorance when it touches our own lives. And instead of all these misfortunes, we moved into a little modest white cottage befitting our modester income, and allowed its eighteenth-century loveliness to be our gradual education. I believe that making a home should be a matter of both leisure and affection; lacking either quality people get "a roof over their heads - an address," but nothing else. And I think also that you have to love your house as you do your children, because it exacts a price, because it is a bother, a blessed bother; you must be willing to offer oblation and sacrifice.

Of course we made mistakes, but not many; we did n't have money enough to go very far in the wrong direction. Besides, all the time our house was training us; the minute we put the wrong things against the walls or on the mantels, it rebuked us gently but persistently, keeping on until we had acknowledged our fault and removed the offending object. All of which brings me to the subject of my dear antiquities; very soon we realized that anything but old furniture looked silly in our small cottage, and, little by little, we began to acquire it, by purchase, by "swapping," and, occasionally, by fortunate gift and inheritance. I think I am very like the man who "never wanted to bring up a young house"; yes, I greatly resemble him, and I admit a frank and honest inclination for old chairs and tables that so well accord with old walls. But I also admire old furniture in a new setting; L------'s young house is a thousandfold lovelier because of the rested, restful, bygone furniture which fills it. But there are n't enough antiquities for everybody, you insist. Probably not, but that's just why I urge you to begin collecting at once, for unless you understand old furniture you'11 never recognize a good reproduction when you see it, and until you know old furniture from the pocketbook point of view - why, you just never will know it! After all, everything does go back to the economic basis, and we are more apt to appreciate what we have to pay for. Most of us, too, have the nucleus of a collection, or a few heirlooms which will look better with the right sort of copies than the wrong kind of reproductions. When I behold some pieces of furniture I always want to quote Gellett Burgess: -

Now take that gaudy pseudo-chair, A bold, upholsterrific blunder. It does n't wonder why it's there, We don't encourage it to wonder.

Sad to say, a great deal of present-day furniture is blundering, whether it is upholstered or not; inaccurate, expensive travesties of once lovely and forgotten modes, lacking both subtle line and cunning craftsmanship, I am disheartened every time I see these tawdry ameublements advertised. One especially quaint recommendation I am very sure I shall never forget. It ran, "A fine William and Mary Suite in the popular Jacobean Finish." Poor William of Orange! The Battle of the Boyne might never have been fought at all! For beyond everything else, furniture is tangible history, and unless you can realize its background, the periods which made it, the influences which shaped it, why, you'11 do very well to leave collecting alone.

But let's go back to luck. There's lots of it left, really. For your encouragement I will say it has been computed by experts that, unless collections are willed to museums or historical societies, they come upon the market every twenty-five years. So there will always be something to buy! Moreover, the broad road that stretches has n't yet lost its enchantment, its lure of beckoning fortune. Last summer B------ found an excellent bannister-back armchair for fifteen dollars - it had moved out on the piazza, that halfway house to the shed - and I got a beautiful old, old "drawn-in" rug and two pieces of Stiegel glass for even less. And but recently we acquired a fine maple blanket-chest for eight dollars, and knew the misery of just losing the prettiest of rope-carved bureaus, which went to an earlier bird for only twenty dollars. (I really do think it's fearfully nouveau collector to boast of how little you pay, but I am guilty of this antique indiscretion because I want to show you that it actually can be done.) But you must take time and trouble for these results; you must rise early and toil late; follow many clues, and learn to become "a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles"; and, above all, cultivate a Favorite Dealer, an Esteemed Secondhand Man, and an Obliging Junkman. Thus will your collection increase; your heart and your purse grow light together, although your money will also go farther than by any other method.

All this if you are, like me, "inconveniently poor." I often wonder why some women look at collecting from such a queer angle; they wouldn't expect to get their gowns from Worth or Paquin, yet it never seems to occur to them that there are "shabby shops" on dingy little side-streets where frequently there are adorable things to buy. Nor, to continue the dressmaking analogy, can I understand why a woman who will study a fashion magazine with almost passionate intensity, will embark so lightly on the purchase of furniture that she must live with every day, regardless of what it signifies, of what goes together. I have seen rooms so unrelated in decoration: part boudoir, part with drawing-room, part "den" (atrocious word!), that I instinctively remembered Claire's advice to Sidonie, "Trop de bijoux, mignonne. . . . Et puis, vois-tu, avec les robes montantes on ne met pas des fleurs dans les cheveux." And yet it is n't hard to learn. All this knowledge is as much yours as mine; where I got it you may find it, too: in books, looking at collections, wandering pleasantly through museums.

Perhaps, if you are rich beyond the dreams of avarice, all this doesn't apply to you; but, rich or poor, what a happy life is a collector's! There is that best of all things - anticipation; there is always something to want. If I had known Alexander the Great, he would n't have wasted his time weeping, for I 'd have persuaded him to enterprise the pleasant pursuit of historical glass cup-plates, and then he would n't have had any desire to lament a conquered world. It would still be unconquered, you see; completeness would ever have eluded him!

That's the way it should be. Build your house like Aladdin's, forever to lack a window. Mine lacks two at present. There's a dreadful, disfiguring radiator in my front hall. It refuses to be ignored, and it straddles insolently across the only place I could ever hope to put a highboy. When it's out of my way I shall be a moderately contented woman.

And then I want an Edouart silhouette; for choice, a dear little New Orleans fillette, with a nosegay in her hand, or her lips just parted to sing "Cadet Rousselle" or some gay bergerette. And when I have this, some other window of desire will swing magically open, and so I shall go through life, my reach always exceeding my grasp - the real heaven on earth for a true collector.

A. V. L. C.

Webster Cottage

Hanover, New Hampshire

June, 1922