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.
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