would have liked
to be supposed to have) visited. But my collection was, first of all, a
private autobiography, a record of my scores of Fate; and thus
positively to falsify it would have been for me as impossible as
cheating at 'Patience.' From that to which I would not add I hated to
subtract anything--even Ramsgate. After all, Ramsgate was not London;
to have been in it was a kind of score. Besides, it had restored me to
health. I had no right to rase it utterly.

But such tendresse was not my sole reason for sparing those two
letters. Already I was reaching that stage where the collector loves
his specimens not for their single sakes, but as units in the
sum-total. To every collector comes, at last, a time when he does but
value his collection--how shall I say?--collectively. He who goes in
for beautiful things begins, at last, to value his every acquisition
not for its beauty, but because it enhances the worth of the rest.
Likewise, he who goes in for autobiographic symbols begins, at last, to
care not for the symbolism of another event in his life, but for the
addition to the objects already there. He begins to value every event
less for its own sake than because it swells his collection. Thus there
came for me a time when I looked forward to a journey less because it
meant movement and change for myself than because it meant another
label for my hat-box. A strange state to fall into? Yes, collecting is
a mania, a form of madness. And it is the most pleasant form of madness
in the whole world. It can bring us nearer to real happiness than can
any form of sanity. The normal, eclectic man is never happy, because he
is always craving something of another kind than what he has got. The
collector, in his mad concentration, wants only more and more of what
he has got already; and what he has got already he cherishes with a
passionate joy. I cherished my gallimaufry of rainbow-coloured labels
almost as passionately as the miser his hoard of gold. Why do we call
the collector of current coin a miser? Wretched? He? True, he denies
himself all the reputed pleasures of life; but does he not do so of his
own accord, gladly? He sacrifices everything to his mania; but that
merely proves how intense his mania is. In that the nature of his
collection cuts him off from all else, he is the perfect type of the
collector. He is above all other collectors. And he is the truly
happiest of them all. It is only when, by some merciless s