is soul's idol to the retired
brewer who possessed the missing brick. Then he tried flint hatchets
and other implements of Primeval Man, but by and by discovered that the
factory where they were made was supplying other collectors as well
as himself. He tried Aztec inscriptions and stuffed whales--another
failure, after incredible labor and expense. When his collection seemed
at last perfect, a stuffed whale arrived from Greenland and an Aztec
inscription from the Cundurango regions of Central America that made all
former specimens insignificant. My uncle hastened to secure these
noble gems. He got the stuffed whale, but another collector got the
inscription. A real Cundurango, as possibly you know, is a possession of
such supreme value that, when once a collector gets it, he will rather
part with his family than with it. So my uncle sold out, and saw his
darlings go forth, never more to return; and his coal-black hair turned
white as snow in a single night.

Now he waited, and thought. He knew another disappointment might kill
him. He was resolved that he would choose things next time that no other
man was collecting. He carefully made up his mind, and once more entered
the field-this time to make a collection of echoes.

"Of what?" said I.

Echoes, sir. His first purchase was an echo in Georgia that repeated
four times; his next was a six-repeater in Maryland; his next was a
thirteen-repeater in Maine; his next was a nine-repeater in Kansas;
his next was a twelve-repeater in Tennessee, which he got cheap, so
to speak, because it was out of repair, a portion of the crag which
reflected it having tumbled down. He believed he could repair it at a
cost of a few thousand dollars, and, by increasing the elevation with
masonry, treble the repeating capacity; but the architect who undertook
the job had never built an echo before, and so he utterly spoiled
this one. Before he meddled with it, it used to talk back like a
mother-in-law, but now it was only fit for the deaf-and-dumb asylum.
Well, next he bought a lot of cheap little double-barreled echoes,
scattered around over various states and territories; he got them
at twenty per cent. off by taking the lot. Next he bought a perfect
Gatling-gun of an echo in Oregon, and it cost a fortune, I can tell
you. You may know, sir, that in the echo market the scale of prices
is cumulative, like the carat-scale in diamonds; in fact, the same
phraseology is used. A single-carat echo