ack over her trim
young shoulder, adding: "They say their furniture has come. Everybody is
down to the junction, studyin' it. I'm glad it ain't mine."

It was true that the furniture had arrived. Braving the vicissitudes of
sea routes; badly shipped by an Italian warehouse, and roughly handled
at an American port, still the furniture had arrived. It had been dumped
out of its crated cars at the little Brook Center station. To the lover
of Flemish and Spanish carving, to the connoisseur of Genoese cabinets
and Italian intarsia, to the student of time-fumed designs and forms,
the coming of this furniture might well have been an event; for by a
freak of destiny, on the little platform of an obscure country junction
were assembled the hoardings of centuries of tradition, the adored
heirlooms of a long line of ancestry. One huge case, half wrecked,
showed the gleam of Florentine brasses; another, crated and roped,
revealed faded Genoese brocades; slender broken legs and edges of carved
flaps protruded from battered sheathings. To some minds all this might
have spelled a certain sort of poetry; to the curious group assembled at
the junction it spelled eccentricity and, what was worse, a fixed and
immoral shabbiness of existence!

The junction agent pointed out a half-crated table standing by itself;
it looked inconceivably old and was of a timber unknown to Brook Center.
Its rickety four legs, wrapped separately, tapered off into carvings of
opulent nymphs and the wild, laughing faces of dryads and fauns--these
legs were observed by the curious groups at the junction to be badly
worn and honeycombed with worm-holes.

"For the vanilla," it was whispered from one to another; the junction
agent, hand over mouth, bowed himself backward in mirth. "They say it's
all from her home, and this is the dinin'-room table. My! My! My! ain't
it awful, all them old, ancient things?"

Mr. Pawket, affecting a connoisseurship unconsciously copied from the
architect, bent over the table, examining it; with vague puzzlement he
passed his hand over its cut and hacked surface--surface on which
hundreds of monks of the time of Clement III had whetted their restless
knives.

"I don't onderstand it; I don't onderstand it"--the old farmer feebly
shook his head--"unless it's she ain't used to nothin' better and he's
kep' his mouth shut. 'Twould be like Willum to pertend he didn't care;
he was always biddable. M' wife could feed him anythin' from po