ay sales or privately, because they love them, and
sometimes sell them again because they must. Frequently these old things
appeal, not because of any intrinsic value that they may have, not
even for their beauty, for they may be quite unattractive even to the
cultivated eye, but rather for their associations. Such folk love to
reflect upon and to speculate about the long-dead individuals who have
owned the relics, who have supped their soup from the worn Elizabethan
spoon, who have sat at the rickety oak table found in a kitchen or an
out-house, or upon the broken, ancient chair. They love to think of the
little children whose skilful, tired hands wrought the faded sampler and
whose bright eyes smarted over its innumerable stitches.

Who, for instance, was the May Shore ("Fairy" broidered in a bracket
underneath, was her pet name), who finished yonder elaborate example on
her tenth birthday, the 1st of May--doubtless that is where she got
her name--in the year 1702, and on what far shore does she keep her
birthdays now? None will ever know. She has vanished into the great
sea of mystery whence she came, and there she lives and has her being,
forgotten upon earth, or sleeps and sleeps and sleeps. Did she die young
or old, married or single? Did she ever set _her_ children to work other
samplers, or had she none? was she happy or unhappy, was she homely or
beautiful? Was she a sinner or a saint? Again none will ever know. She
was born on the 1st of May, 1692, and certainly she died on some date
unrecorded. So far as human knowledge goes that is all her history, just
as much or as little as will be left of most of us who breathe to-day
when this earth has completed two hundred and eighteen more revolutions
round the sun.

But the kind of collector alluded to can best be exemplified in the
individual instance of him from whom the manuscript was obtained, of
which a somewhat modernized version is printed on these pages. He has
been dead some years, leaving no kin; and under his will, such of his
motley treasures as it cared to accept went to a local museum, while
the rest and his other property were sold for the benefit of a mystical
brotherhood, for the old fellow was a kind of spiritualist. Therefore,
there is no harm in giving his plebeian name, which was Potts. Mr.
Potts had a small draper's shop in an undistinguished and rarely visited
country town in the east of England, which shop he ran with the help
of an assistan