It is in this broad field that the collector in these days gets the most enjoyment; here he may heighten the pleasures of the hunt for philatelic and associated _rariora_. So many wonderful tales have been told of the fabulous fortunes acquired in the finding of a few old letters bearing stamps, that many a deal is frustrated by the uninitiated owner having too fanciful an idea of the value of his goods. It is rare in these days for such an incident to happen as I witnessed about twelve years ago. A gentleman, who had been turning out some old papers, came across an unsevered block of eight five-shilling British stamps which had been sent to his father, presumably as a remittance, somewhere in the early 'eighties. Here was £2 lying idle for years, but having luckily noticed them in clearing out these old papers, the gentleman thought he would see if they were still exchangeable at a post-office. At the first post-office he visited, he was told that the stamps were of an old issue, and that to get them converted into cash he would have to take them to Somerset House. On his way thither he noticed a stamp-dealer's show case, and apparently the possible interest of his specimens in the stamp-market then first occurred to him. He called in, and simply asked if the dealer would give him the £2, to save him the trouble of going on to Somerset House. The dealer, who had probably never seen an unsevered block of eight of the five-shillings "anchor" of 1882, obliged him readily, which he could well afford to do, as he passed on the stamps the same week to a collector for £75. These things do happen, but in the "legitimate" stamp-collecting they are necessarily of rarer occurrence in these days of popular newspapers, over-educating in certain directions, or at least pandering to the common desire for a royal road to easy wealth. Many dealers have told me that it is their experience that, if they make a fair offer for valuable stamps submitted to them by the uninitiated, they never succeed in effecting a purchase at all in these days. The hawker of "finds" visits the stamp-shops to get an idea of the value of his wares, and plays off one dealer against another, with the result that it is necessary for the seller nowadays to state his price in the first instance.