It is really a happy day for a household when one of its members develops a hobby and begins to make a collection—not of buttons or business cards, but of something on which genuine study will not come amiss, and there is hardly any line in which one is likely to interest himself where he may not often pick up for a mere trifle much that will be of special value to his collection, much that, by itself, would be comparatively worthless, but which in a collection has added worth and dignity; and any collection makes a new point of interest in a home. In a quiet country town where I once lived, the boys of the village took to collecting butterflies and insects. Farmers carried turpentine or benzine in their pockets, and would come home from their haying fields with hats gay with the captured moths and butterflies they were taking to the collectors of their several households. Thus homes hitherto utterly wanting in any æsthetic influence, seemed to brighten into something positively charming, when father and mother, son and daughter clustered about the drawers in the front parlor, exhibiting to any chance visitor the fragile treasures so carefully arranged within them, and when a new specimen was captured the collector would “Run it o’er and o’er with greedy view, And look and look again, as he would look it through.” Think of the many lines in which the collector may work! The postage stamp craze was by no means to be despised; it was a good geography lesson for the children, and well up to the times, throwing in a little history as well. Coin collecting is yet more profitable in the same lines, and when confined to the coins of one’s own land, gives a wide enough range for the average collector. For the out-of-door student there are shells, sea mosses and birds’ eggs, flowers to press, and minerals to secure. One boy hunts up Indian relics, another collects weapons of various sorts, from “The old queen’s arm which Gran’ther Young Fetched back from Concord, busted,”