Now the house in which Mr. Potts dwelt had once been of considerable pretensions and was very, very old, Elizabethan, I should think, although it had been refronted with a horrible stucco to suit modern tastes.  The oak staircase was good though narrow, and led to numerous small rooms upon two floors above, some of which rooms were panelled and had oak beams, now whitewashed like the panelling—­at least they had once been whitewashed, probably in the last generation.

These rooms were literally crammed with every sort of old furniture, most of it decrepit, though for many of the articles dealers would have given a good price.  But at dealers Mr. Potts drew the line; not one of them had ever set a foot upon that oaken stair.  To the attics the place was filled with this furniture and other articles such as books, china, samplers with the glass broken, and I know not what besides, piled in heaps upon the floor.  Indeed where Mr. Potts slept was a mystery; either it must have been under the counter in his shop, or perhaps at nights he inhabited a worm-eaten Jacobean bedstead which stood in an attic, for I observed a kind of pathway to it running through a number of legless chairs, also some dirty blankets between the moth-riddled curtains.

Not far from this bedstead, propped in an intoxicated way against the sloping wall of the old house, stood the clock which I desired.  It was one of the first “regulator” clocks with a wooden pendulum, used by the maker himself to check the time-keeping of all his other clocks, and enclosed in a chaste and perfect mahogany case of the very best style of its period.  So beautiful was it, indeed, that it had been an instance of “love at first sight” between us, and although there was an estrangement on the matter of settlements, or in other words over the question of price, now I felt that never more could that clock and I be parted.

So I agreed to give old Potts the L20 or, to be accurate, L18 14s. which he asked on the 10 per cent. rise principle, thankful in my heart that he had not made it more, and prepared to go.  As I turned, however, my eye fell upon a large chest of the almost indestructible yellow cypress wood of which were made, it is said, the doors of St. Peter’s at Rome that stood for eight hundred years and, for aught I know, are still standing, as good as on the day when they were put up.

“Marriage coffer,” said Potts, answering my unspoken question.

“Italian, about 1600?” I suggested.

“May be so, or perhaps Dutch made by Italian artists; but older than that, for somebody has burnt 1597 on the lid with a hot iron.  Not for sale, not for sale at all, much too good to sell.  Just you look inside it, the old key is tied to the spring lock.  Never saw such poker-work in my life.  Gods and goddesses and I don’t know what; and Venus sitting in the middle in a wreath of flowers with nothing on, and holding two hearts in her hands, which shows that it was a marriage chest.  Once