"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