"I have given up books and pictures," said Cooper. "I now devote myself entirely to collecting samples of the world's wisdom."

"Proverbs, do you mean?" I asked.

"No, but the facts on which proverbs are based. You see, I grew tired of pictures when it got to be a question of bidding against millionaires for the possession of spurious old masters. The break came when Downes proved that my Velasquez was painted in 1896. His own, it turned out, was done in 1820; but even then, you see, he had the advantage over me. So I concentrated on books. But I could not resist the temptation of glancing through my first editions now and then, and the pages began to give way. Then I tried Chinese porcelains. There, again, I had to compete against Downes, who ordered his agent to buy two hundred thousand dollars' worth of Chinese antiquities for the Louis XIV. room in his new Tudor palace. And, besides, this rather disconcerting thing happened: I had as my guest a mandarin who was passing through New York on his way to Europe, and I showed him my collection of jades. 'There was only one collection like this in China some years ago,' I told him. 'Yes,' he replied, 'it was in my house when the foreign troops entered Peking in 1900.' So I decided to sell my porcelains.

"But of course I had, as you say, to collect something, and for a long time I could think of no field in which a cultivated taste and personal effort could make way against the competition of mere brute millions. And then, all at once, I hit upon proverbs. The suggestion came in a rather peculiar fashion. It seems that there was an eccentric old poet on Long Island who spent many years in collecting all sorts of inanimate freaks, odds and ends, and rubbish. When he died they found among his treasures a purse made out of a sow's ear and a whistle made from a pig's tail. I saw my opportunity at once. The eccentric old man, by acquiring two such extraordinary objets d'art had indulged himself in a sneer at the world's proverbial wisdom. I would come to the rescue of our threatened stock of experience by gathering the facts that upheld it. I would make it, besides, more than the selfish hobby of the private collector who gives the world only a very little share of the pleasure he tastes. I would make my collection a museum and a laboratory. Instead of reading about the wise ant and the busy bee people should come and see them in the life. It was the difference between reading about animals in a book and seeing them in the life."

"And have you succeeded?" I asked.

"Beyond all expectations," he replied. "Come, I will take you through my galleries," and he showed the way into the queerest garden I have ever seen. It was as if a menagerie and a museum had been brought together in the open air. Between enclosures and cages which harboured animals of all species, ran long tables supporting glass cases like those used for exhibiting coins or rare manuscripts.

"Now here," he said, stopping before a small chest with a glass top, "here is my collection of straws."

"Straws?" I said.

"Yes. It is small but select. Here, for instance, is the last straw that broke the camel's back. Some one suggests that it must have been a Merry Widow hat, but that's jesting, of course. This again is the straw that showed which way the wind blew and enabled a politician to change sides and get a reputation as a reformer. We will see the politician further on." I noticed then for the first time that the iron-barred cages contained human beings as well as beasts. "Here is a handful of straws which an entire conference of theologians spent three months in splitting. This," pointing to a little mannikin about four inches high, "is the man of straw whose defeat in debate gave one of our United States Senators his brilliant reputation. And this, finally, is a handful of straws out of the pile on which Jack Daw slept when he gave up his bed to buy his wife a looking-glass, or, as some one has suggested, an automobile.

"And now observe the advantages of my method. The student, having been shown the straw that broke the camel's back, will, if he is a cautious student, well drilled in the methods of modern research, demand to see the camel. Well, here it is," and Cooper turned toward a large enclosure where several members of the family CamelidÆ were peacefully browsing, with the exception of one that lay in a corner with drooping head and closed eyes, apparently lifeless. "It's been hard work, of course, and expensive, keeping a broken-backed camel alive, but, encouraged by such examples of the remarkable vitality of animals as may be seen for instance in the Democratic donkey, I have persisted and succeeded. This rather thin-legged creature near the fence is the camel that tried to pass through the needle's eye, and the one close beside him is the one swallowed by the man who strained at a gnat. Harrington asserts that he has never been able to see how either phenomenon is possible, but the problem is only half as difficult as it appears. For it is evident that if a camel were small enough to pass through the eye of a needle, there would be comparatively little trouble in swallowing him. And, speaking of needles, it has been a constant regret that my collection is still without a needle found in a haystack."

I have not the space to enumerate one tithe of what Cooper showed me. As we hurried past the cages containing numerous specimens of Homo Sapiens, he contented himself with pointing out a physician who had failed to cure himself by psycho-therapeutics; a shoemaker who by sticking to his last failed to become a railroad president, though in the course of time he could tell where every man's shoe pinched; an importer who, in defiance of the Pure Food law, put new wine into old bottles, and labelled them Bordeaux; and a harmless-looking man of middle age, who continued to smile and smile, and had played Iago, Macbeth, and Hamlet's uncle. Before a sturdy-looking man dressed in working-clothes Cooper stopped for a moment and said, "Mr. C. W. Post and Mr. James Farley assure me that this is the rarest item in my collection."

"Who is he?" I asked.

"It is a union labourer who is worthy of his hire," Cooper said.