With no great difficulty you secure another lot.  Then begins the hunt—­you buy assortments at the price of bank notes, merely for the sake of two or three out of the mass.  You offer to barter twenty-five for one you have not got.  Then you have all but three, which you demand from the universe at large:  then all but two; then all but one.  What you pay for that one you keep a profound secret, lest your family should have you put under control.  Even then you are not safe, for some of your engravings have false margins, and must be changed for entire examples.  Such are the joys of the collector, for shadows we are and engravings a toutes marges we pursue.

Footnotes: 

{6} Except with worm in a summer flood.

{8} Perhaps an Editor put this moral in?

{16} The author once caught a salmon.  It did not behave in any way like the ferocious fish in this article.

{23} Mr. Wordsworth, in his poem of “The Recluse,” expresses a horror of this diversion.

{37} It is a melancholy fact that the Author has quite forgotten what did happen!  Thus a narrative, probably diverting, is for ever lost, thanks to the modesty of our free Press.

{135} These remarks were made before the great discovery of some modern authors, that the best novels are those in which there is never a petticoat.

{152} What was this anecdote?