Country Life
By IAN NIALL
Jr often seems to me a strange thing, and perhaps a sort of criticism of the modern trend, how each country generation'collects and makes curios of the things an earlier one had in everyday use. The warm- ing pan is one of the older of these pieces, and ranks as an antique, but other brass and copper souvenirs or heirlooms are often less than a generation away from the period of general use. Brass candlesticks were in this category at the beginning of the century, but until only twenty-five years ago horsebrass and gig- lamps, those big brass ones which, along with the harness, received a burnishing on Saturday in prepara- tion for church on Sunday, were strictly utilitarian in purpose or association. Time makes treasure of a brass preserving-pan and the mariner's port and star- board lights. Such collections of brass and copper would greatly have amused great-grandfather as he sat rocking in his chair watching great-grandmother preparing wool for spinning. He, perhaps, had a horse-pistol on his mantelpiece and a few snuff boxes about the place, while he cherished the old fowling piece his grandfather 'once used, but who then thought anything of giglamps and who had use for them but to light the way home after a convivial evening? While on this subject, who could name the curios of our own time?
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