ar the rushing of a river. As Cleghorn leaned over the well-mouth
before seizing the crank, a glimmer of yellow light flooded his face and
again came up the hollow impatient cry, "Haul away, Sam. This lot's a
good one, and it's mine." Replying "All right, Dick," Cleghorn bent to
the crank. With much creaking the coils crept along the spindle and the
light burden began to rise jerkily.

* * * * *

Although neither the well nor the vaulted cellar chamber belonged to Sam
Cleghorn or to Dick Webb, their presence and actions there were not
surreptitious. Stanton Mayhew, who ignorantly owned the well, had given
them plenary permission to pump and dig, mildly pitying their apparent
lunacy. The palace above was his in virtue of his sensible preference for
living twice as well on the Arno for half the cost on the Hudson. This
rule of two, like so many foreign residents of Florence, he
unquestioningly obeyed, and it constituted practically the whole of his
philosophy and maxims. Hence he was not the man to prize a Tuscan well
dug in the fourteenth century, cleaned perhaps never, and gradually
filled to the brim with what the forwardlooking past benightedly took for
rubbish. So when Cleghorn and Webb made him an overture for the right to
clean the well, he had genially replied, "Why, go ahead, boys, and enjoy
yourselves. It's you who ought to be paid, but for your healths' sake you
really ought to wait till I've punched some decent windows through that
damp cellar wall and let the air in."

If neither Sam nor Dick waited even a day, it was because each was a bit
afraid that the other would begin alone. College mates, collectors both,
they were fast friends in a way and rivals beyond dispute. Their common
taste for antiquity and adequacy of means had made their graduate course
chiefly one of travel. And when travel wore out its novelty they
naturally settled in the easiest, as the least exacting, European city,
occupying two halves of one floor in the same palace. Their apartments
started full, and quickly overflowed with objects of curiosity and
art--all old, for their knowledge was considerable; some fine, for
neither was without taste. But taste neither had in any austere sense,
for they collected art much as a dredge collects marine specimens.
Nothing came amiss to them. Wood, ivory, silver, bronze, marble,
plaster--they repudiated no material or period. Stuffs, glass, pictures,
porcelains, potter