A French form of the seventeenth century is the Cassette. The example illustrated (p. 57) has brass corners and brass bands at top and at sides with fleur-de-lis ornament. This particular specimen has a number of secret drawers. The Cassette is really a form of coffer for storing state bullion: caisse, literally money in the chest. It was the royal cash box of seventeenth-century days.

Two Flemish steel coffers (illustrated p. 61) show massive construction. The heavy sides are braised together, and a lock extends across the inside of the lid with four bolts in one and three bolts in the smaller example. When the lid is slammed the bolts lock the box, which is opened with a key. In addition there are two hasps for use with padlock. These examples are painted in colour. It is curious that in many partly worn old examples traces of green paint are found on them. A particular fashion seems to cling to certain objects for centuries. In the sixteenthcentury portrait of the merchant Georg Gisz by Holbein, in his counting-house, there is a ledger bound in green with the peculiar vellum cross stitching in white still employed in ledgers, and the fashion will continue until American loose leaved spring-back modern inventions drive it into oblivion.

In contemplating the coffer and its various forms, the panorama of dead days floats before one's vision, with procession of great and powerful

states whose merchants were princes. Treasure followed the old trade routes of the Venetians and the Portuguese. In the North, Hanseatic merchants builded great fortunes. Spanish fleets swept across the Atlantic into Cadiz laden with gold. The Dutch East India Company filled the houses in the Low Countries with spoils from India and China. In the days of Clive and Warren Hastings, under John Company generations of rich nabobs flourished, men who governed and traded and looted, and whose morals were of the days of Charles James Fox, who put his footmen in the velvet plush credited to him. for use as bags at the Treasury.

The spade of man has not yet unearthed the hidden treasure-houses of the past. It is a lingering thought that the hills hold their secrets or that the sea caves conceal the hoard of wealthy desperadoes of centuries ago. These imaginings have provided novelists with a rich vein. Charles Kingsley in Westward Ho! and Robert Louis Stevenson in Treasure Island founded the school in which the treasure chest has cast its spell over the reader. Even an empty coffer contains dreams as inexhaustible as the wealth of the Incas. To the dilettante collector, content with visible symbols of former glories and the splendour of a day long departed, there is something irresistibly soothing even in the contemplation of nothing.

The Casket. The coffer is masculine, and the