Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/46

 The strange phenomena, connected with the stamp-collecting mania, are among the peculiarities developed in these pages. Extraordinary revelations are made, of the patience and perseverance exhibited by "collectors" of this kind. Some of these advertise, for exchange, books containing upwards of five hundred stamps, foreign and colonial, or eight hundred postmarks in an album. Is it conceivable that anybody can want eight hundred postmarks? Another collector offers "a book with double clasps, containing one thousand and seventy arms, crests, and monograms, all coloured; Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, arms of all nations, county arms, nearly all the army, militia, volunteer, schools, &c." There are, likewise, strange and terrible treasures of the monogram and stamp kind, and some very mysterious matters indeed, which are called "eccentrics." Here is a fearfully mystifying announcement: "I have twenty military badges, and Adam and Eve eccentric, to exchange for others; or would give two badges for Tom Dawson's cat, Miss Senhouse, Miss Charlton's fan, Mr. Milbank's eccentric." Mr. Tom Dawson's cat is the subject of another advertisement, and is evidently a much prized and well-known specimen among "eccentrics."

Through the agency of the department of this Periodical, called the "Exchange," persons encumbered may get a different set of objects more suitable to their wants; while another department of the Journal, "The Mart," affords them a chance of turning these same unappreciated wares into money. It is probably a good thing that such a system as this should be in existence, for even if the parties to these transactions do not acquire any very valuable additions to the number of their possessions, they at least get a change in the nature of their encumbrances, and that is something. For, even if you skip out of the frying-pan into the fire, it must still be admitted that you do get a change, and perhaps—though the general opinion seems to run the other way—a change not altogether for the worse.

THE HALL PORTER AT THE CLUB.

MY VERSION OF POOR JACK.

"Poor Jack" of whom I write is not a sailor, though perhaps for him also, as well as for the Poor Jack whom Charles Dibdin has immortalised, there may be a sweet little cherub sitting up aloft. My Poor Jack is a landsman, and, although he will not admit the fact, a beggar. There is this much to be said for his denial of the truth, that he is to a certain extent a trader, and that in the summer months and the early autumn he does a certain amount of profitable business—profitable from his humble point of view, though never sufficiently remunerative to enable him to deal with either the tailor or the shoemaker. His whole attire is eleemosynary, and his raggedness, though doubtless very uncomfortable to himself, is exceedingly picturesque, and might, if any good artist happened to fall in with him, procure for him the honour of a sitting, and such reward in silver as the pose might be worth. Jack is sixty-five years of age, and has a large handsome brown beard, striped rather than sprinkled with grey. Though I have known him for three or four years, I never saw him but once without his hat on—a very battered and tattered one it is—and then I discovered that his beard was the only hirsuteness he could exhibit, and that, in fact, his head was as bald and devoid of hair as a basin. His elbows peep out from his sleeves, and his toes from his miserable old shoes, and his general raggedness is as looped and windowed as that which Lear pitied and Shakespeare described. In his youth Poor Jack was a carpenter, but he has not done a stroke of carpenter's work for upwards of forty years, having, as he says, been disabled at five-and-twenty by