HKB
Coins--Origin of My Feeling for Them--Humble Commencement--Groping in the Dark--My Scanty Means and Equally Scanty Knowledge, but Immense Enthusiasm and Inflexibility of Purpose--The Maiden Acquisition Sold for Sixteenpence--The Two Earliest Pieces of the New Departure--To Whom I first went--Continuity of Purchases in All Classes--Visit to Italy (1883)--My Eyes gradually opened--Count Papadopoli and Other Numismatic Authorities--My Sketch of the Coins of Venice published (1884)--Casual Additions to the Collection and Curious Adventures--Singular Illusions of the Inexperienced--Anecdotes of a Relative--Two Wild Money-Changers Tamed--Captain Hudson--The Auction-Thief--A Small Joke to be pardoned.
I started as a numismatist by the merest accident in 1878, at the precise juncture when, owing to the sudden death of Mr Huth, I was concluded by my well-wishers to be on the brink of ruin. My son, who was then quite a little fellow, had had a first-brass Roman coin presented to him by a gentleman, whose intentions were excellent; and shortly after a relative, who had kept by him in a bag a number of 'butcher's' pennies of George III. and a few other miscellaneous pieces, and who was profoundly anxious to throw them away, made a free gift of the whole collection to the same recipient. I was naturally led to examine our treasure trove, not by the light of experience of coins, of which I had absolutely not a tittle, but by that of my knowledge of collateral and analogous matters, in which several years' training had developed certain conclusions; and I soon formed a private estimate of the twofold donation unfavourable to the judgment of the late proprietors.
The youthful owner himself was not the master of any definite views on the subject. There was the bag and there its contents; and they remained for some time inviolate, while I was deliberating and instituting inquiries at intervals, myself a sheer tyro. I believe that in my strolls about the suburbs I added to the cabinet without greatly improving it. Mr Huth was no more; and the future was not reassuring. My early acquisitions went many to the shilling. I was not more than a lesson or so ahead so far of my boy and his kind friends. Of works of reference, despite my acquaintance with books, I knew nothing. Of those, who could have put me on the right track, I was equally ignorant. I do not think that I had heard of such an institution as the Numismatic Society. It was new ground, and I stood on the edge of it contemplatively, bag in hand--the bag not even strictly my own--with a wavering sentiment and with decreased resources--resources likely to decrease yet more. One morning chance led me, as I passed, to linger at the window of Messrs Lincoln & Son in New Oxford Street; and after a pause I went in. The result was momentous in this sense, that I saw at the shop mentioned a 'butcher's' penny, which bore the same relation to the inmates of the bag as an immaculate copy of a book or a faultless piece of china bears to the most indifferent specimens imaginable; and I handed half-a-crown to Lincoln for his coin, which I took home with a rather full heart. We compared notes, and I privately meditated a coup. A few days after, our sixteen 'butcher's' pennies and sundries just realised what I had given for the cornerstone of a New Collection; and I may say that at a distance of nearly twenty years I yet keep that piece, which has become a very difficult one to procure in unexceptionable state--far more so than the twopence of the same type and date.