Rugs

James F. Ballard, St. Louis amateur, presented his collection of 129 rare oriental rugs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Manhattan. He still has 250. In the 18 years during which he has collected rugs, he has traveled over 300,000 miles in search of his textile treasures. Some of them cost him as much as $35,000 and years of pursuit, and with the acquisition of almost every one is connected a tale of adventure or hardship. Two Seljuk " bird rugs," woven in 1550, were secured in Constantinople in 1922 and went with him through the sack and massacre of Smyrna. Hungary, Thrace, Rhodes, Asia Minor, Persia, Bagdad, Damascus--all are represented.