Page 8 - Yamanaka co Auction catalog

the day of exhaustion any time arrived, but that refutation fol-
lows with the succeeding year. It has come again.
This collection, smaller than some that have been offered to
public competition by the same hands, is in some of its com-
ponents noteworthy even among the admirable ones which have
been exhibited in New York. If its owners have rare fortune in
finding fine examples, it is not only because the quest is keen, but
intelligent, assiduous, and industrious. Chinese dealers-and it
is not uninteresting to recall that some prominent Peking bu i-
ness houses have existed for centuries-are not alone looked to,
but expert agents are sent about by the Messrs. Yamanaka to
make specific hunts, which accounts for a part of the gratifying
success exemplified in the present collection.
In China itself people will tell you: "The Japanese get the best
of everything here"; and in Japan itself some of the finest of
Chinese things are found. Some were brought there age ago. In
China the assembling of the "fruits" of the interior near the
coast, and the search of the marts with those strange, laby-
rinthine streets-some scarce wide enough for the passage of a
'ricksha-is a process which only intensifies the interest of the
few collectors who have enjoyed it, and to which tho c at home
are indebted. It ought to be considered a privilege rather than
a commercial transaction to acquire some of the rarest of these
yields laid down in New York.
Among the decorative productions other than porcelains in
this year's collection the small group of bird-cages is sure to
attract attention, and makes timely a word on a little-known
trait of the Chinese, their treatment of their pet-bird companions.
Even in the sorry streets of teeming cities one finds, where trees
attract wild birds, groups of people sitting on green banks or
squatting on the sun-baked mud, with their caged household pets
about them-brought out for an airing where they may sing
among their free companions and hear their fellows' song.
Or here and there a man, leaving the cage at home, is to be
seen walking along the street with his bird attached by a yard or
so of string to a short crutch-handled stick like a walking cane,
swung horizontally at arm's-length or held in the air parasol-
like, the bird perched on the crutch singing, or taking a hort