an
urn commemorating nothing.

I think that every one who is or ever has been a collector will pity me
in this dark hour of mine. In other words, I think that nearly every
one will pity me. For few are they who have not, at some time, come
under the spell of the collecting spirit and known the joy of
accumulating specimens of something or other. The instinct has its
corner, surely, in every breast. Of course, hobby-horses are of many
different breeds; but all their riders belong to one great cavalcade,
and when they know that one of their company has had his steed shot
under him, they will not ride on without a backward glance of sympathy.
Lest my fall be unnoted by them, I write this essay. I want that glance.

Do not, reader, suspect that because I am choosing my words nicely, and
playing with metaphor, and putting my commas in their proper places, my
sorrow is not really and truly poignant. I write elaborately, for that
is my habit, and habits are less easily broken than hearts. I could no
more 'dash off' this my cri de coeur than I could an elegy on a
broomstick I had never seen. Therefore, reader, bear with me, despite
my sable plumes and purple; and weep with me, though my prose be, like
those verses which Mr. Beamish wrote over Chloe's grave, 'of a
character to cool emotion.' For indeed my anguish is very real. The
collection I had amassed so carefully, during so many years, the
collection I loved and revelled in, has been obliterated, swept away,
destroyed utterly by a pair of ruthless, impious, well-meaning,
idiotic, unseen hands. It cannot be restored to me. Nothing can
compensate me for it gone. It was part and parcel of my life.

Orchids, jade, majolica, wines, mezzotints, old silver, first editions,
harps, copes, hookahs, cameos, enamels, black-letter folios,
scarabaei--such things are beautiful and fascinating in themselves.
Railway-labels are not, I admit. For the most part, they are crudely
coloured, crudely printed, without sense of margin or spacing; in fact,
quite worthless as designs. No one would be a connoisseur in them. No
one could be tempted to make a general collection of them. My own
collection of them was strictly personal: I wanted none that was not a
symbol of some journey made by myself, even as the hunter of big game
cares not to possess the tusks, and the hunter of women covets not the
photographs, of other people's victims. My collection was one of those
which result from man's tend