d before the year 1800.
He would show you a collection of more than thirty-nine thousand
pamphlets, of which eight thousand were printed before the year 1800.
His collection of maps relating to America was truly wonderful. Besides
all the early atlases of any note, he had over a thousand detached maps
illustrative both of the geography and history of America; for many of
them were maps and plans drawn for military purposes. He would show you,
perhaps, a pen-drawing of date 1779, by a British officer, upon which
was written: "Plan of the rebel works at West Point." He had also
several plans by British officers of "the rebel works" around Boston
during the revolution.

Besides such things (and he had over three hundred plans and maps of
which there was no other copy in existence), he possessed a surprising
number of books printed in the infancy of the printer's art; among them
specimens representing every year from 1467 onward. He had more than two
hundred and fifty books printed before the year 1600, so arranged that a
student could trace the progress of the art of printing from the days of
Caxton. He had also a vast collection of manuscripts, numbering four
hundred and twenty-nine volumes, many of which were of particular
interest. The whole number of volumes in the library was 22,529, and the
number of pamphlets nearly 40,000.

The reader, perhaps, imagines that the collector of such a library must
have been a very rich man, and that he traveled far and wide in search
of these precious objects. Not at all. He never was a rich man, and I
believe he rarely traveled beyond the sight of the dome of the Capitol.
Indeed, the most wonderful thing about his collection was that he, who
began life a journeyman printer, and was never in the receipt of a large
income, should have been able to get together so vast an amount of
valuable material. Part of the secret was that when he began to make his
collection these things were not valued, and he obtained many of his
most precious relics by merely taking the trouble to carry them away
from the garrets in which they were mouldering into dust, unprized and
unknown.

A wise old New York merchant, long ago himself mouldered into dust, used
to say:--

"Men generally get in this world exactly what they _want_."

"How can that be?" asked a youngster one day. "Almost everybody in New
York wants to be rich, but very few of them ever will be. I _want_ a
million or so myself."

"Ah, bo