For fifty years they lay under glass in the Dickerson museum and they
were labeled "The Medici Boots." They were fashioned of creamy
leather, pliable as a young girl's hands. They were threaded with
silver, appliqued with sapphire silks and scarlet, and set on the tip
of each was a pale and lovely amethyst. Such were the Medici boots.

Old Silas Dickerson, globe-trotter and collector, had brought the
boots from a dusty shop in Florence when he was a young man filled
with the lust for travel and adventure. The years passed and Silas
Dickerson was an old man, his hair white, his eyes dim, his veined
hands trembling with the ague that precedes death.

When he was ninety and the years of his wanderings over, Silas
Dickerson died one morning as he sat in a high-backed Venetian chair
in his private museum. The Fourteenth Century gold-leaf paintings, the
Japanese processional banners, the stolen bones of a Normandy
saint--all the beloved trophies of his travels must have watched the
dead man impassively for hours before his housekeeper found him.

The old man sat with his head thrown back against the faded tapestry
of the Venetian chair, his eyes closed, his bony arms extended along
the beautifully carved arms of the chair, and on his lap lay the
Medici boots.

It was high noon when they found him, and the sun was streaming
through the stained-glass window above the chair and picking at the
amethysts, so that the violet stones seemed to eye Marthe, the old
housekeeper, with an impudent glitter. Marthe muttered a prayer and
crossed herself, before she ran like a scared rabbit with the news of
the master's death.

Silas Dickerson's only surviving relatives, the three young
Delameters, did not take too seriously the note which was found among
the papers in the museum's desk. Old Silas had written the note. It
was addressed to John Delameter, for John was his uncle's favorite,
but John's pretty wife, Suzanne, and his twin brother, Doctor Eric,
read it over his shoulder; and they all smiled tolerantly. Old
Dickerson had written of things incomprehensible to the young moderns:

"The contents of my private museum are yours, John, to do with as you

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