A Million Stamps.

Evening Star, Issue 7406, 29 December 1887, Page 4

A Million Stamps.

Where is the child who has not at some period of his life begun to collect old postage stamps, in the fond hope of accumulating a million of those perfectly worthless articles ? How ardently he seta out on the pursuit, rummaging in old desks and pouncing upon every letter the postman brings to the door. How easily the first 500 are gathered in, and how slowly they come after that. How neatly they are tied up in little packages of a hundred each, and how tiresome the whole business becomes when, after months of labor, the box is found to contain just seventy-one of these packages, with a few old stamps lying loose in the corners. Seven thousand and one hundred subtracted from 1,000,000 leaves 992,900. The boy begins to think that this would have been capital fun for Methuselah, providing he had started early in life, but that it does not quite suit the present rate of existence.

Now, who is responsible for the notion that any particular value is attached to a million of old stamps ? When I was a little girl we used to firmly believe that they were worth lOOdol, and it was the wild hope of possessing this unheard-of sum that spurred us on to action. But who was to pay the lOOdol, or why the would-be purchaser must have exactly a million, were questions we never stopped to ask. Perhaps we thought it would be time enough for that when we had completed our count. There were strange and conflicting rumors, however, as to the ultimate destination of the stamps. Some said they were to be sent to the missionaries in China to buy a Chinese baby ; some that they were to go to France to be made into papier-mache—-then a much more popular article than it is now ; and some that they were to bo sold to a foreign nation of unknown name and singular decorative tastes, who used nothing else in papering their houses. In fact, there seemed no end of the uses to which they could be put, provided always that they reached the proper number of a million ; for even the very poorest of Chinese parents would apparently have scorned to part with their infant for any less. All this might seem, perhaps, too foolish for even children to believe, but the fact is that the legend of the million of stamps is one not destined to die, and even grown-up men and women now and then fall victims to its extraordinary fascinations. Within the last year hundreds of benevolent people were actually busy begging for cancelled stamps in order to obtain admission for an old lady into a Philadelphia “home.” A Germantown physician took the matter in charge, and it was understood that when the necessary million had been collected, they were to be handed over by his wife to a friend, who was to give them to another friend, who was to give them to a third, who know' someone who would arrange with somebody else for the old lady’s final reception. The craze spread so far that packages of stamps arrived by every mail from New York, Washington, Chicago, and Boston. Little schoolgirls and fashionable young women vied with each in their eagerness to aid this good work, and half the requisite number had actually been scraped together before it began to dawn on people’s minds that the only possible use that any “home” could make of a million stamps would be to sell them for old paper. Then an enterprising Philadelphia reporter undertor k to hunt up the old lady, whose name was Peterman, and having found her, had the pleasure of hearing from her own lips that she had no idea of going into any institution at all.— ‘ Harper’s Young People.’