I searched under a pleasant hot sun, without success, for an unbroken calyx of a crinoid. 
        The most I ever found was a fragment. This I set in a bed of cotton, between two columns 
        of stem segments, in a collector's box I had inherited from my grandmother.

             Sifting through this story at forty-two, with the weathered self-assurance of middle    
        age, what did I pick out for display? 

        That I did not arrange the stem segments into a single column for the fragment to sit atop
        (that I did not try to reconstruct a crinoid). That I  arranged the pieces simply -- naturally
        and self-authenticatingly -- as a collection.