collector would. 

 Up until comparatively recently wormholes, considered as such, had no great lure to me. If I thought of them at all I thought of them as a topic which was rather lacking in interest to begin with and one easily exhausted. If you had asked me about wormholes I—speaking offhand—probably would say that this was a matter which naturally might appeal to a worm but would probably hold forth no great attraction for a human being, unless he happened to be thinking of going fishing. But this was in my more ignorant, cruder days, before I took a beginner's easy course in the general science of wormholes. I am proud of my progress, but I would not go so far just yet as to say that I am a professional. Still I am out of the amateur class. I suppose you might call me a semi-pro, able under ordinary circumstances to do any given wormhole in par. 

 For example, at present I have an average of three correct guesses out of five chances—which is a very high average for one who but a little while ago was the veriest novice at distinguishing between ancient wormholes, as made by a worm, and modern wormholing done by piece-work. I cannot explain to you just how I do this—it is a thing which after a while just seems to come to you. But of course you must have a natural gift for it to start with—an inherent affinity for wormholes, as it were. 

 However, I will say that I did not thoroughly master the cardinal principles of this art until after I had studied under one of the leading wormhole experts in this country—a man who has devoted years of his life just to wormholes. True, like most great specialists he is a person of one idea. Get him off of wormholes and the conversation is apt to drag, but discussing his own topic he can go on for hours and hours. I really believe he gets more pleasure out of one first-class, sixteenth-century wormhole than the original worm did. And as Kipling would say: I learned about wormholes from him. 

 At the outset I must confess I rather leaned toward a nice, neat, up-to-date wormhole as produced amid sanitary surroundings in an inspected factory out in Michigan, where no scab wormholes would be tolerated, rather than toward one which had been done by an unorganized foreign worm—possibly even a pauperized worm—two or three hundred years ago, when there was no such thing as a closed shop and no protection against germs. Whenever possible I believe in patronizing the products of union labor. But the expert speedily set me right on this point. He made me see that in furnishings and decorations nothing modern can possibly compare 

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