painless. If anything like
cruelty were involved in their destruction, I would sooner not collect
them at all, but just make a study of them in their wild state.

I am only a poor little girl, and I can find nothing whatever on the
subject in any reference book in the public reading-room. I need expert
advice. There is quite a nice collection of famous--and infamous--people
near Baker Street Station, but I am told these are only simulacra. That
would not suit me at all. I am far too genuine, downright, and truthful
to put up with anything less than the real thing.

There must be some way of doing it. I should like to have a stuffed M.P.
in a glass case at each end of the mantelpiece in my little boudoir.
They need not be of the rarest and most expensive kinds. A pretty Labour
Member with his mouth open and a rustic background, and a Coalitionist
lightly poised on the fence, would please me.

It would be so interesting to display one's treasures when people came
to tea.

"Never seen a real leader-writer?" I should say. "They're plentiful
locally, but mostly come out at night, and so many people miss them. It
is not of the least use to put treacle on the trees. The best way is to
drive a taxi slowly down Fleet Street about one in the morning and look
honest. That's how I got the big leader-writer in the hall. Just press
his top waistcoat button and he'll prove that the lost election was a
moral victory.

"In the next case? Oh, they're just a couple of little Georgian poets.
They look wild, but they're quite tame really. Sprinkle an advance on
account of royalties on the window-sill and they'll come for it. It used
to be pretty to watch those two, pouring adulatory articles over each
other. They sing chopped prose, and it seemed almost a pity to kill
them; but there are plenty more.

"And that very pretty creature is an actress; if you drop an interviewer
into the left hand corner of the dressing-room you will hear her say: 'I
love a country life, and am never happier than when I am working in my
little garden,'--insert here the photograph in the sun-bonnet--'I don't
think the great public often realizes what a vast amount of----'"

But I am talking about collecting other people. I am wandering from my
subject. I must collect myself.

At a very early age I caught the measles and a little later on the
public eye. The latter I still hold. But I do not often lose anything
except friends, and occasionally the last 'b