ies--it was all one to them so the object were old and
rare. Inevitably, then, they had come to primitive pots, and
simultaneously, for they not only watched each other closely, but almost
read each other's minds. And when they came to primitive pots it was
certain that they would beg, borrow, or steal a well, since in old wells,
and cisterns, besides less mentionable places, primitive pots abide. Many
pots were there, as we shall see, from the first, and the maids and
children of the centuries, by way of concealing breakages, have usually
made notable secondary contributions. So when amiable Stanton Mayhew
freely conceded a most ancient well to Cleghorn and Webb, it was like
receiving Pandora's box, with the difference that the well might safely
be opened.

Here had ensued a most delicate negotiation concerning the division of
the spoil. A mathematical partition of the fragmentary material that an
old Italian well contains is extremely difficult if at all possible.
After much debate it was agreed that after they struck pay dirt, each
should dig in turn, each to have the bucketful that came under his trowel
or fingers. Scattered fragments of the same pot and other complications
were to be adjudicated by Mayhew, whose ignorance and disinterestedness
were safe to assume. But the well gave up quantities of noncontentious
matter before Mayhew's services were required. The first five feet had
revealed nothing but fragments of kitchen pottery of our time and a
fairly perfect hoopskirt of Garibaldian date. A little lower had emerged
the skeleton of a cat. Similar tragedies were in evidence, on an average,
at every quarter century of depth. Between the second and third cat, lay
Ginori imitations of Sevres and Wedgewood, scraps too of gilded
glass--the earnest of better things below. Five cats down, some
eighteenth-century apothecary pots, damaged but amenable to repair, had
inaugurated the alternation of buckets under the agreement. It were
tedious to follow the ascending scale of excellence as the digging went
deeper. Enough to say that below the mixed ingredients and the nethermost
cat they found a homogeneous layer of beautiful fourteenth-century
shards, affording many buckets full, and promising delicate adjudication
to the referee.

Before the lustred pots themselves shed a baleful gleam over this
narrative, something should obviously be said about Italian wells and why
they contain pots. Beyond those casually acquired fr