e that the
desk is genuine, buy it. Next, read up on the furniture of the
particular period to which your desk belongs, in as serious a manner
as you do when you buy a prize dog at the show. Now you have made an
intelligent beginning as a collector. Reading informs you, but you
must buy old furniture to be educated on that subject. Be eternally on
the lookout; the really good pieces, veritable antiques, are rare;
most of them are in museums, in private collections or in the hands of
the most expensive dealers. I refer to those unique pieces, many of
them signed by the maker and in perfect condition because during all
their existence they have been jealously preserved, often by the very
family and in the very house for which they were made. Our chances for
picking up antiques are reduced to pieces which on account of reversed
circumstances have been turned out of house and home, and, as with
human wanderers, much jolting about has told upon them. Most of these
are fortified in various directions, but they are treasures all the
same, and have a beauty value in line colour and workmanship and a
wonderful fitness for the purposes for which they were intended.

"Surely we are many men of many minds!"

PLATE V

The sofa large, strong and luxuriously comfortable; the curtains
simple, durable and masculine in gender. The tapestry and
architectural picture, decorative and appropriately impersonal,
as the wall decorations should be in a room used merely for
transacting business.

[Illustration: _A Corner of the Same Office_]

Some prefer antiques a bit dilapidated; a missing detail serving as a
hallmark to calm doubts; others insist upon completeness to the eye
and solidity for use; while the connoisseur, with unlimited means,
recognises nothing less than signed sofas and chairs, and other
_objets d'art_. To repeat:--be always on the lookout, remembering that
it is the man who knows the points of a good dog, horse or car who can
pick a winner.

Wonderful reproductions are made in New York City and other cities,
and thousands bought every day. They are beautiful and desirable
pieces of furniture, ornaments or silks; but the lover of the _vrai
antique_ learns to detect, almost at a glance, the lack of that
quality which a fine _old_ piece has. It is not alone that the
materials must be old. There is a certain quality gained from the long
association of its parts. One knows when a piece has "foun