There were many artifacts in Daddy's room, very old portraits of relatives in gilded frames, ivory carvings from the Far East, framed scripts or letters written in Gaelic and some Slavic dialects, beautiful jeweled boxes, statuary from Greece and Italy in wall niches, some old clocks, wall tapestries from the Middle Ages created in France and England, and a marble table on which were many interesting things he had collected or had been given through the years—lockets, small pearl-handle knives, and, strangely enough, some bones encased in glass. He never spoke of them, and I never asked him about them, but we all understood they were the bones of his ancestors.