law of growth which he
thus saw exemplified moved the Patient Observer to throw open the gates
of pent-up eloquence. He lit his pipe and began to discourse to Philip
on the world, on life, and on a few things besides.

And when it was time for both of us to go to bed, Philip stood up and
said, "I wish I came every day. You don't know what a bore it is,
listening to that drool the 'profs' hand you out up there." His fervent
young spirit would not be silent until, with one magnificent gesture, he
had swept the tobacco jar to the floor and shattered two electric lamps.
Then he went to his room and left me wondering at the vast mysteries
that underlie the rough surface of the sophomore's soul.

X

THE COMPLETE COLLECTOR--I

"I have given up books and pictures," said Cooper. "I now devote myself
entirely to collecting samples of the world's wisdom."

"Proverbs, do you mean?" I asked.

"No, but the facts on which proverbs are based. You see, I grew tired of
pictures when it got to be a question of bidding against millionaires
for the possession of spurious old masters. The break came when Downes
proved that my Velasquez was painted in 1896. His own, it turned out,
was done in 1820; but even then, you see, he had the advantage over me.
So I concentrated on books. But I could not resist the temptation of
glancing through my first editions now and then, and the pages began to
give way. Then I tried Chinese porcelains. There, again, I had to
compete against Downes, who ordered his agent to buy two hundred
thousand dollars' worth of Chinese antiquities for the Louis XIV. room
in his new Tudor palace. And, besides, this rather disconcerting thing
happened: I had as my guest a mandarin who was passing through New York
on his way to Europe, and I showed him my collection of jades. 'There
was only one collection like this in China some years ago,' I told him.
'Yes,' he replied, 'it was in my house when the foreign troops entered
Peking in 1900.' So I decided to sell my porcelains.

"But of course I had, as you say, to collect something, and for a long
time I could think of no field in which a cultivated taste and personal
effort could make way against the competition of mere brute millions.
And then, all at once, I hit upon proverbs. The suggestion came in a
rather peculiar fashion. It seems that there was an eccentric old poet
on Long Island who spent many years in collecting all sorts of inanimate
freaks, odds and en