Meanwhile, upstairs, Kelp and Chefwick were filling their pockets with earrings, necklaces, bracelets, rings, brooches, watches, tiepins, a golden dollar sign money clip clutching nearly eight hundred dollars, and whatever other sparkly items attracted their magpie eyes.

Equipped with an education from Radcliffe, a new job as a file clerk in a publishing company and a magpie eye for detail, she called things pretty much as she saw them, she said last week.

Produced for export to Europe, the tray is ornamentalism as orientalism, sure to appeal, now as then, to a Westerner's magpie eye and taste for the exotic.

Examples from all those places are here in writing boxes and tea trays guaranteed to appeal to any window-shopper's acquisitive yearnings and magpie eye.

Fifty years after the event, Patterson followed the trail of Starkweather and Fugate across Nebraska and into Wyoming, his magpie eye picking out landscapes, buildings, woods, wastegrounds and darkly suggestive interiors.

As the show's name suggests, Mrs. Apfel, who toots around town in signature bangles and owlish spectacles, is an oddball hybrid: a bird of paradise with a magpie eye for sorting and gathering.