This piece is so remarkable in my experience, I couldn't believe it at first...but here it is, just back from a trip to the cleaners. This specimen features razor-sharp, metallic octohedral crystals of cuprite to just over 1 cm in size, forming a knoll atop native copper. When I got it from Linck's collection, the piece was so dark it looked black, and lacked luster, plus the copper was not visible and I had no idea it was underneath! Physical cleaning revealed a very nice metallic luster and the dark red color underneath 100 years of accumulated dirt, though I doubt it was ever professionally cleaned since the day it was mined and certainly never looked this good (especially now that it is trimmed a bit, and sits on its own!). NOTE THAT this piece was not chemically cleaned as some cuprites are these days! The red color shown is natural (dark red in the upper photos taken with a white-light bulb; and a brighter red with internal glints under a strong and close halogen light source). The piece is crystallized almost all around, though admittedly with some damage around the backside and contacted massive cuprite lower on the piece where I removed some rather clunky and broken parts of the matrix that really detracted. It is even minutely crystallized on the bottom; perhaps indicating that the whole specimen broke off and fell into the pocket, where further crystallization occurred over the break point? Given the hefty weight of the piece, this wouldn't surprise me if my guess were true. The native copper is visible as copper sheets underneath the specimen and around the lower periphery, admixed with massive cuprite. The specimen was in the notable collection of Albert Petereit, who apparently started selling his specimens in 1909. Quite a few of the best American classics in the Gage collection, including this one and the Pulsifer piece above, came from Petereit, who was well known on the East Coast as a connoisseur of American minerals. 6.5 x 5 x 5 cm