The reader, perhaps, imagines that the collector of such a library must have been a very rich man, and that he traveled far and wide in search of these precious objects. Not at all. He never was a rich man, and I believe he rarely traveled beyond the sight of the dome of the Capitol. Indeed, the most wonderful thing about his collection was that he, who began life a journeyman printer, and was never in the receipt of a large income, should have been able to get together so vast an amount of valuable material. Part of the secret was that when he began to make his collection these things were not valued, and he obtained many of his most precious relics by merely taking the trouble to carry them away from the garrets in which they were mouldering into dust, unprized and unknown. A wise old New York merchant, long ago himself mouldered into dust, used to say:-- "Men generally get in this world exactly what they _want_." "How can that be?" asked a youngster one day. "Almost everybody in New York wants to be rich, but very few of them ever will be. I _want_ a million or so myself." "Ah, boy," the old man replied, "you want a million; but you don't want it enough. What you _want_ at present is pleasure, and you want it so much that you are willing to spend all your surplus force, time, and revenue to get it. If you wanted your million as much as you _want pleasure_, by and by, when you have a bald head like mine, you would have your million." Peter Force was a very good illustration of the old merchant's doctrine. He got all these precious things because he wanted them with a sustained passion of desire for half a century. There never was a time when he would not have gladly got up in the middle of the night and walked ten miles, in the face of a northeasterly storm, to get a rare pamphlet of four pages. He was a miser of such things. But, no; that word does not describe him; for one of the greatest pleasures of his life was to communicate his treasures to others; and he communicated to the whole American people the best of his collections in massive volumes of American Archives. He was a miser only in the strength of his desire. "More than once," he said to Mr. George W. Greene, "did I hesitate between a barrel of flour and a rare book; but the book always got the upper hand." To the same friend he made a remark which shows that his desire to communicate was quite as strong as his desire to obtain. "Whenever," said he, "I found a little more money in my purse than I absolutely needed, I published a volume of historical tracts."