I don't just remember when I began to collect coins, but I think it was about 1846. Strange to say it was during a spell of sickness, and my bank of coppers was the means of lighting the dormant spark into flame. I was a child of six or seven years, and while in my sick bed my mother gave me the contents of my 'bank' to amuse me. I remember it was an old fashioned sugar bowl, for this was before the day of elaborate and intricate designs.

The pennies then were all in copper, mostly our own country, a few Canadian, New Brunswick, or Nova Scotia half-pennies or pennies, with an occasional King George half-penny that some of his soldiers had probably left behind while on a hasty visit some 30 or 60 years previously, which my grandfather often told me.

Dr. Bolus said I had the measles; that I was pretty sick.… It was during this period when the measles "struck out" that with me coin collecting "struck in," the former never to return, the latter never to leave me.

It was during this period that I first realized the difference in dates and arranged them in series, when, strictly speaking, I began to study (?) them, and perforce became not merely a gatherer together, but a numismatist. My parents did not realize this latter danger until later. Of course, I was ignorant of the risk; however, I survived.

I suppose all beginners in coins in the United States first try to obtain the series of cents. My first effort was to obtain one bearing the date of my birth, an easy task; then those bearing the dates of birth of my father and mother; here I found to get an 1821 was not so easy. My next ambition was to get all the dates of the cents, and by trading my duplicates for others, I ere long had a very respectable list.

The half-cents, though regularly issued at this time, I found hard to obtain. I have always found them comparatively so. In fact, though these pieces have not been struck for nearly 40 years, I can obtain them as easily today as in any time in the past. During their first 19 years of coinage they may have been a popular coin, the earlier ones showing evidences of considerable circulation, but from the beginning of the second and last series in 1825, they never became popular with the masses, and during many of the intervening years up to 1857 they were issued only in Proof.

This series was never a popular one with the older collectors, and seems less favored with the present. In these early days foreign coppers were rarely found outside of those heretofore mentioned. Occasionally a Connecticut or New Jersey cent would turn up, but they were always poor, necessarily so to escape the cordon of collectors in large cities who are constantly on the lookout, so we of the interior had poor picking indeed. The consequence was that our collections were usually limited to the United States series of cents and half-cents.

I notice the tendency of the day is to decry the collecting of the series of dates, and to collect only types. This may do in this day, when the whole ancient and modern world lays her numismatic treasures almost at our feet, when our collecting is only limited by the capacity of our pocketbooks, but 40 years ago things were different.

I here feel constrained to say, and do so without fear of contradiction, that there is nothing more beautiful in the numismatic line than that drawer in your cabinet of Fine to Proof U.S. cents from 1793 to 1857. How they glow in their different shades-red, brown, olive, seal [sic] and black. There is no coin more beautiful than an Uncirculated copper with its color softened or toned down by time, and per contra there is nothing uglier than a poor one. Your silver and gold series in monotonous color may represent more intrinsic value, but in beauty the coppers surpass, as they often do in fictitious value.

Have we in any series of coin, foreign or domestic, a more beautiful head of Liberty than on our cents from 1793 to 1807, and from 1808-1814? Have you anything in your cabinet better in design or die execution than is shown in our cents of the 1840s or 1850s? Compare our latest coinage in this year of grace 1893-1894 and tell me if we are advancing along the line or no? I may be prejudiced, but to all this I would enter an unqualified denial.

My voice is still for the collecting of the U.S. cent-the old fashioned cent-in series; and from what I can learn, and the price they are bringing these days when in good condition, I am assured they still hold a warm place in the hearts of most collectors. And so my first confession will be a weakness for the copper of my boyhood days, the best we ever had."