For the most part, they are crudely
coloured, crudely printed, without sense of margin or spacing; in
fact, quite worthless as designs. No one would be a connoisseur in
them. No one could be tempted to make a general collection of them. My
own collection of them was strictly personal: I wanted none that was
not a symbol of some journey made by myself, even as the hunter of big
game cares not to possess the tusks, and the hunter of women covets
not the photographs, of other people's victims. My collection was one
of those which result from man's tendency to preserve some obvious
record of his pleasures--the points he has scored in the game. To
Nimrod, his tusks; to Lothario, his photographs; to me (who cut no
dash in either of those veneries, and am not greedy enough to preserve
menus nor silly enough to preserve press-cuttings, but do delight in
travelling from place to place), my railway-labels. Had nomady been my
business, had I been a commercial traveller or a King's Messenger,
such labels would have held for me no charming significance. But I am
only by instinct a nomad. I have a tether, known as the four-mile
radius. To slip it is for me always an event, an excitement. To come
to a new place, to awaken in a strange bed, to be among strangers! To
have dispelled, as by sudden magic, the old environment! It is on the
scoring of such points as these that I preen myself, and my memory is
always ringing the `changes' I have had, complacently, as a man
jingles silver in his pocket.
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