This store has been in my family for three generations. I was raised to know what is and is not quality, and I believe a simple look around the shop will prove that. Go ahead, look: you'll find nothing but the finest here, quality heirlooms that have, in some cases, been passed down for five centuries, items of unquestioned perfection, things that have stood the test of time and now stand before you as enduring monuments to ages long gone. More exquisite times, when more refined tastes reigned. You'll find nothing here that does not underscore the luxury of the past. Of course, the nature of my shop is that people bring things to sell. Estate sales, in the main. But my reputation is such that no one comes with anything less than the best, since they know that I can get the best price for them as a result. So it came as a small surprise one afternoon when an elderly gentleman came into my shop. Not my usual customer, you may rest assured -- he was dressed in a suit and overcoat and porkpie hat that had long seen better times. Still, the shop had been quiet all day, so, rather than send him away, I asked him if I could help him. Yes, he replied, taking out a worn metal box. Would there be any possible interest in this item? I examined the box itself: a plain, simple metal box, with evidence of decades of wear. A lesser dealer than myself would have swindled the man right then and there, but I could not. I shook my head and gave it back to him. No, he said, you dont understand. It's inside. I opened the box, and there, on a bed of plush burgundy velvet, was a wooden ring. A simple, plain, wooden ring. It had been in his family for centuries, he said, passed from one generation to another upon the oldest male's wedding day. His family, for all their once wealth, used this as a test of the true love of its recepient, and not once, in all this time, had it ever failed them. His wife, he continued, wore it for sixty years before she passed on. Now, having no children, he had no one to pass it on to. I picked it up, gently. It was old, that much was certain. Without markings of any kind, it was difficult to assign a definite age, but the craftsmanship was quite probably from the Middle Ages. That was a guess, nothing more, which made it impossible to verify. The inside was well worn from the hundreds of years and scores of fingers it must have adorned. Perhaps oak, perhaps walnut -- it was difficult to tell. But it had no real value to me, so I put it back in the box and returned it to him, suggesting another shop down the road that might consider it. Disappointed, he nodded and left. I had no real choice, you understand. For all the value he might have given it, it was simply a wooden ring in a metal box. Nothing more.