The Marquis Goes Donkey-Riding by Adeline Adams

My great-grandmother was by no means an accomplished French scholar. Was yours? And even in English, my great-grandmother's spelling was far from faultless. In those well-thumbed receipt-books of hers, written by her own hand, and still beautifully legible, you will note that she sometimes doubles the _t_ in butter, and sometimes not; she generally gives an _h_ to sugar, and seldom allows an egg more than one _g_ to stand on. But the far-flung fame of her cooking did not suffer in consequence. And had her prowess in languages and in orthography been equal to her skill in the household arts of her day (spinning, weaving, brewing, and the like), my cousin Felix might never have known the joyous adventures of a collector of Lafayette silver. For frankly, it was my great-grandmother, who, owing to a slip in her French, first sent the marquis on his donkey-riding. Lafayette in Egypt! Cousin Felix never rested until he got to the bottom of the matter.

Felix Bradford, you must know, is one of the great color manufacturers of the age. Tube colors, of course. There's more in the business, and perhaps less in the tubes, than one would expect. But Felix is a thoroughly good sport; and twenty years ago, finding that he was making a comfortable income from the art of painting (other men's painting), he decided to become a collector of something besides money. Colonial silver, for example; and he hoped to include among his treasures the lost Lafayette porringer, from which as a child he had often been spiritually fed.