h the
first lot. The batch of lustred pots is the pride of his eye, and when it
is suggested that he values them highly he answers, "Well rather, they're
pretty good, you know, and then they nearly cost me a broken head. I was
so keen for them that I set a big stone where it might easily have
tumbled on me." Then the rest of the anecdote, which Cleghorn, in whose
presence it frequently is told, never hears with complete equanimity. The
causes of his uneasiness I do not engage to analyse, for, unlike Webb,
Cleghorn is imaginative and difficult.

THE BALAKLAVA CORONAL

As the dinner wore on endlessly, I consoled myself by the thought of the
Balaklava Coronal. There in the toastmaster's seat was Morrison who had
bought it, at my right loomed Vogelstein who had sold it, far across,
towards the foot of the board, sat the critic Brush in whose presence I
understood the infamous sale had been made. I missed only Sarafoff, the
marvellous peasant-silversmith, who wrought the coronal in his prison
workshop in the Viennese ghetto. Now there was nothing strange about
Vogelstein's selling it, nor yet about Morrison's buying it; only the
making of it by the illiterate Sarafoff and the silence of Brush when it
was sold required explanation. Vogelstein, who breathed heavily beside
me, undoubtedly held the secret. I felt so hopeful that time and the
champagne which we were drinking for the sake of art would give him to me
that I took no pains meanwhile to disturb his elaborate indifference to
my presence.

Between him and me little love was lost. As the editor of a moneylosing
art magazine in the interior, it was my duty occasionally to visit his
galleries. After such visits the remnant of my New England conscience
usually forced me to diminish or actually to spoil many a sale of the
dubious or merely fashionable antiquities in which he dealt. But in the
main my power to harm him was slight. He held in a knowing grip the
strings of his patrons' vanity and taste. So he regarded me with
something between scorn and uneasiness--as a pachyderm might take a
predatory bee. For the sake of my steady production of the honey of free
advertising he forgave a sting from which he was after all immune. At the
beginning of the dinner he had greeted me with what was meant for a
civility and then had relapsed into silence. To escape the loquacity of
my other neighbour I gave myself to parallel observation of Vogelstein
and Morrison--the great