THE LUSTRED POTS

“Haul away, Sam.  This is the real thing” came from the depths of the well.  Sam Cleghorn stumbled in the gloom towards the windlass, avoiding on the way a rude handpump and two heaps of dirt and broken pottery that sloped threateningly upon the low curb, where balanced a perforated disc of marble, the great bottom-stone of the well.  All these properties caught a little light from a beam that came through a slit in the wall, casting most of its uncertain bloom up into a low groined vault, the heavy round arches of which were separated from squat piers by clumsy brackets.  Outside at the level of the reticulated stone floor one could hear the rushing of a river.  As Cleghorn leaned over the well-mouth before seizing the crank, a glimmer of yellow light flooded his face and again came up the hollow impatient cry, “Haul away, Sam.  This lot’s a good one, and it’s mine.”  Replying “All right, Dick,” Cleghorn bent to the crank.  With much creaking the coils crept along the spindle and the light burden began to rise jerkily.

* * * * *

Although neither the well nor the vaulted cellar chamber belonged to Sam Cleghorn or to Dick Webb, their presence and actions there were not surreptitious.  Stanton Mayhew, who ignorantly owned the well, had given them plenary permission to pump and dig, mildly pitying their apparent lunacy.  The palace above was his in virtue of his sensible preference for living twice as well on the Arno for half the cost on the Hudson.  This rule of two, like so many foreign residents of Florence, he unquestioningly obeyed, and it constituted practically the whole of his philosophy and maxims.  Hence he was not the man to prize a Tuscan well dug in the fourteenth century, cleaned perhaps never, and gradually filled to the brim with what the forwardlooking past benightedly took for rubbish.  So when Cleghorn and Webb made him an overture for the right to clean the well, he had genially replied, “Why, go ahead, boys, and enjoy yourselves.  It’s you who ought to be paid, but for your healths’ sake you really ought to wait till I’ve punched some decent windows through that damp cellar wall and let the air in.”

If neither Sam nor Dick waited even a day, it was because each was a bit afraid that the other would begin alone.  College mates, collectors both, they were fast friends in a way and rivals beyond dispute.  Their common taste for antiquity and adequacy of means had made their graduate course chiefly one of travel.  And when travel wore out its novelty they naturally settled in the easiest, as the least exacting, European city, occupying two halves of one floor in the same palace.  Their apartments started full, and quickly overflowed with objects of curiosity and art—­all old, for their knowledge was considerable; some fine, for neither was without taste.  But taste neither had in any austere sense, for they collected art much