"How long would it take me to get together that number of the things?" Mr. Peters inquired, when, having looked his fill on the dullest assortment of objects he remembered ever to have seen, he was preparing to take his leave.
The specialist was proud of his collection. "How long? To make a collection as large as mine? Years, Mr. Peters. Oh, many, many years."
"I'll bet you a hundred dollars I'll do it in six months!"
From that moment Mr. Peters brought to the collecting of scarabs the same furious energy which had given him so many dollars and so much indigestion. He went after scarabs like a dog after rats. He scooped in scarabs from the four corners of the earth, until at the end of a year he found himself possessed of what, purely as regarded quantity, was a record collection.
This marked the end of the first phase of—so to speak—the scarabaean side of his life. Collecting had become a habit with him, but he was not yet a real enthusiast. It occurred to him that the time had arrived for a certain amount of pruning and elimination. He called in an expert and bade him go through the collection and weed out what he felicitously termed the "dead ones." The expert did his job thoroughly. When he had finished, the collection was reduced to a mere dozen specimens.
"The rest," he explained, "are practically valueless. If you are thinking of making a collection that will have any value in the eyes of archeologists I should advise you to throw them away. The remaining twelve are good."
"How do you mean—good? Why is one of these things valuable and another so much punk? They all look alike to me."
And then the expert talked to Mr. Peters for nearly two hours about the New Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, Osiris, Ammon, Mut, Bubastis, dynasties, Cheops, the Hyksos kings, cylinders, bezels, Amenophis III, Queen Taia, the Princess Gilukhipa of Mitanni, the lake of Zarukhe, Naucratis, and the Book of the Dead. He did it with a relish. He liked to do it.
When he had finished, Mr. Peters thanked him and went to the bathroom, where he bathed his temples with eau de Cologne.
That talk changed J. Preston Peters from a supercilious scooper-up of random scarabs to what might be called a genuine scarab fan. It does not matter what a man collects; if Nature has given him the collector's mind he will become a fanatic on the subject of whatever collection he sets out to make. Mr. Peters had collected dollars; he began to collect scarabs with precisely the same enthusiasm. He would have become just as enthusiastic about butterflies or old china if he had turned his thoughts to them; but it chanced that what he had taken up was the collecting of the scarab, and it gripped him more and more as the years went on.