plans--he only asks that you shall behold, and
beholding, your eye shall glow, and your heart warm within you.

Inasmuch as we live in the age of the specialist, one man often collects
books on only one subject, Dante for instance; another, nothing but
volumes printed at Venice; another, works concerning the stage; and still
another devotes all his spare time to securing tobacco-pipes. And I am
well aware that the man who for a quarter of a century industriously
collects snuffboxes has a supreme contempt for the man who collects both
snuffboxes and clocks. And in this does the specialist reveal that his
normal propensity to collect has degenerated. That is to say, it has
refined itself into an abnormality, and from the innocent desire to
collect, has shifted off into a selfish wish to outrival.

The man who collects many things, with easy, natural leanings toward,
say, spoons, is pure in heart and free from guile; but when his soul
centers on spoons exclusively, he has fallen from his high estate and is
simply possessed of a lust for ownership--he wants to own more peculiar
spoons than any other man on earth. Such a one stirs up wrath and
rivalry, and is the butt and byword of all others who collect spoons.

Prosperous, practical, busy people sometimes wonder why other folks build
cabinets with glass fronts and strong locks and therein store
postage-stamps, bits of old silks, autographs and books that are very
precious only when their leaves are uncut; and so I will here endeavor to
explain. At the same time I despair of making my words intelligible to
any but those who are collectors, or mayhap to those others who are in
the varioloid stage.

Then possibly you say I had better not waste good paper and ink by
recording the information, since collectors know already, and those who
are without the pale have neither eyes to see nor hearts to incline. But
the simple fact is, the proposition that you comprehend on first hearing
was yours already; for how can you recognize a thing as soon as it comes
into view if you have never before seen it? You have thought my thought
yourself, or else your heart would not beat fast and your lips say, "Yes,
yes!" when I voice it. Truth is in the air, and when your head gets up
into the right stratum of atmosphere you breathe it in. You may not know
that you have breathed it in until I come along and write it out on this
blank sheet, and then you read it and say, "Yes--your hand! that is