The story began quite unremarkably: a family inherited a house from their uncle. The house was rather old, and the furniture in it was not new either. Antiques are valuable these days, so they decided to sell off part of the furnishings. That is how a 19th-century antique cabinet ended up at the Brettells auction in England, the publication UPI reports.
It's customary to photograph furniture before selling it, in order to list the item for online bidding. And in the process of the photoshoot, the photographer found a… lemon in one of the drawers. It wasn't possible to identify the fruit right away, since the lemon had, as it turned out, been lying in that drawer for 285 years. On its peel was an inscription: «Given by Mr. P. Lu Franchini on November 4, 1739 to Miss E. Baxter». In those times lemons were worth their weight in gold, so it's no wonder the fruit was being kept for a special occasion. Which, as we can see, never came.
As the auction house reported, the ancient lemon sold for 1,780 dollars. That's more than 160 thousand in rubles. The cabinet, on the other hand, fetched a mere pittance — just 40 dollars, less than four thousand rubles.
