Five years before, a nervous breakdown had sent Mr. Peters to a New York specialist. The specialist had grown rich on similar cases and his advice was always the same. He insisted on Mr. Peters taking up a hobby.
“What sort of a hobby?” inquired Mr. Peters irritably. His digestion had just begun to trouble him at the time, and his temper now was not of the best.
“Now my hobby,” said the specialist, “is the collecting of scarabs. Why should you not collect scarabs?”
“Because,” said Mr. Peters, “I shouldn’t know one if you brought it to me on a plate. What are scarabs?”
“Scarabs,” said the specialist, warming to his subject, “the Egyptian hieroglyphs.”
“And what,” inquired Mr. Peters, “are Egyptian hieroglyphs?”
The specialist began to wonder whether it would not have been better to advise Mr. Peters to collect postage stamps.
“A scarab,” he said–“derived from the Latin scarabeus–is literally a beetle.”
“I will not collect beetles!” said Mr. Peters definitely. “They give me the Willies.”
“Scarabs are Egyptian symbols in the form of beetles,” the specialist hurried on. “The most common form of scarab is in the shape of a ring. Scarabs were used for seals. They were also employed as beads or ornaments. Some scarabaei bear inscriptions having reference to places; as, for instance: ‘Memphis is mighty forever.'”
Mr. Peters’ scorn changed to active interest.
“Have you got one like that?”
“Like what?”
“A scarab boosting Memphis. It’s my home town.”
“I think it possible that some other Memphis was alluded to.”
“There isn’t any other except the one in Tennessee,” said Mr. Peters patriotically.
The specialist owed the fact that he was a nerve doctor instead of a nerve patient to his habit of never arguing with his visitors.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you would care to glance at my collection. It is in the next room.”
That was the beginning of Mr. Peters’ devotion to scarabs. At first he did his collecting without any love of it, partly because he had to collect something or suffer, but principally because of a remark the specialist made as he was leaving the room.
“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.