e walks those galleries the unhappy owner groans under the moral
conviction that there are spurious pictures on his walls, spurious
marbles in his halls, spurious carvings and coins under his glass
cases, and that there they must stay until discovered and exposed.

"A perfect collection, therefore, in the sense of a collection in which
every object can be traced back with absolute certainty to its author
and its place of origin, is impossible. Unless, and that is how the
inspiration came," said Cooper, "unless one set to collecting objects of
art which have been proved to be fraudulent. Then and only then, could
one be sure that one's treasures were just what one believed them to be.
And that is just what I set out to do. I began buying objects of art,
which, after masquerading under a great name, had been exposed and given
up to scorn. I have kept at it for twenty years, and I can now point to
what no American multi-millionaire can ever boast of, a collection made
up _entirely_ of 'fakes.' When I stroll through _my_ little museum I am
obsessed by no doubts. I am as certain as I am of being alive that no
genuine Leonardo or Holbein or Manet or Cellini has found its way under
my roof.

"I must admit," Cooper went on, "that the question of economy has been
an important factor in the case. When we first set up housekeeping, a
year after our marriage, our means were not unlimited and our tastes
were of the very highest. Buying the best work or even the second-best
work of the best painters was out of the question. But buying cheap
copies of the masters, replicas, casts, photogravures, was equally
impossible. The idea of owning anything that some one else may own at
the same time is abhorrent to the true collector. On the other hand, if
we went in for spurious masterpieces, we were sure of securing unique
specimens at very small expense. And I will not deny that the bargain
element appealed very strongly to Mrs. Cooper. Most of our things we
got at really fabulous reductions. There was the crown of an Assyrian
princess of the twenty-fourth century B.C., for which one of the leading
European museums paid $75,000, and which, after it was shown that it had
been made by a Copenhagen jeweller in 1907, I purchased from the museum
for something like fifty-five dollars, plus the freight. This charming
little landscape with sheep and a shepherd boy brought $23,000 in a
Fifth Avenue auction room two years ago. Three months after it wa