Collecting as a Pastime (ePub)

There is a cause for everything. Are antique collectors born or are they made? Is the craze inherent, or do circumstances or environment create the craving? How in later life do early associations influence our peculiar fancies? Possibly my seven years as a choir-boy at Winchester Cathedral attending services and practices there fifteen times weekly, being boarded at the Bishop's Palace, and playing games under the shadow of the ruins of Wolvesey Castle may have laid impressions which tended to render me susceptible to the mediæval. My reflections bring to mind my singing at the enthronement of Bishop Samuel Wilberforce, and seeing the bones of King Rufus taken out of his tomb and laid in skeleton form on the floor of the chancel. In those times a man was not considered too old at forty, as the Dean was doing his little bit at ninety. To go back still farther, when quite a small boy I lay for weeks with a broken leg, which had to be broken a second time owing to poor setting, in a room out of which there was a secret chamber for hiding those "wanted" in the good old days. This ancient home with its pointed gables and windows was suitably named "Gothic Lodge," and is near Southampton, close to a house in which Lord Jellicoe's grandfather resided.