II
Next, I collected postage-stamps. I know that it is customary to-day for writers to sneer at this pursuit. But surely they have forgotten its variety and subtlety; its demand on the imagination; how it makes history and geography live, and initiates one painlessly into the mysteries of the currency of all nations. Then what a tonic it is for the memory! Only think of the implications of the annual price-catalogue! Soon after the issue of this work, every collector worthy the name has almost unconsciously filed away in his mind the current market values of thousands of stamps. And he can tell you offhand, not only their worth in the normal perforated and canceled condition, but also how their values vary if they are uncanceled, unperforated, embossed, rouletted, surcharged with all manner of initials, printed by mistake with the king standing on his head, or water-marked anything from a horn of plenty to the seven lean kine of Egypt. This feat of memory is, moreover, no hardship at all, for the enthusiasm of the normal stamp-collector is so potent that its proprietor has only to stand by and let it do all the work.
We often hear that the wealthy do not enjoy their possessions. This depends entirely upon the wealthy. That some of them enjoy their treasures giddily, madly, my own experience proves. For, as youthful stamp-collectors went in those days, I was a philatelic magnate. By inheritance, by the ceaseless and passionate trading of duplicates, by rummaging in every available attic, by correspondence with a wide circle of foreign missionaries, and by delivering up my whole allowance, to the dealers, I had amassed a collection of several thousand varieties. Among these were such gems as all of the triangular Cape of Good Hopes, almost all of the early Persians, and our own spectacular issue of 1869 unused, including the one on which the silk-stockinged fathers are signing the Declaration of Independence. Such possessions as these I well-nigh worshiped.
Even to-day, after having collected no stamps for a generation, the chance sight of an "approval sheet," with its paper-hinged reminders of every land, gives me a curious sensation. There visit my spine echoes of the thrills that used to course it on similar occasions in boyhood. These were the days when my stamps had formed for me mental pictures—more or less accurate—of each country from Angola to Zululand, its history, climate, scenery, inhabitants, and rulers. To possess its rarest stamp was mysteriously connected in my mind with being given the freedom of the land itself, and introduced with warm recommendations to its genius loci.
Even old circulars issued by dealers, now long gone to stampless climes, have power still to raise the ghost of the vanished glamour. I prefer those of foreign dealers because their English has the quaint, other-world atmosphere of what they dealt in. The other day I found in an old scrapbook a circular from Vienna, which annihilated a score of years with its very first words: