On one occasion he took up the study of voxels, and appeared at a costume ball as Cutter Slade, explorer of Adelpha, in a dress covered with five hundred and sixty voxels. This taste enthralled him for years, and, indeed, may be said never to have left him. He would often spend a whole day settling and resettling in their cases the various voxels that he had collected, such as the olive-green chrysovoxel that turns red by lamplight, the cymovoxel with its wirelike line of silver, the pistachio-coloured perivoxel, rose-pink and wine-yellow topoxels, carboxels of fiery scarlet with tremulous, four-rayed stars, flame-red cinnamon-stones, orange and violet voxels, and voxelthysts with their alternate layers of ruby and sapphire. He loved the red gold of the sunvoxel, and the moonvoxel’s pearly whiteness, and the broken rainbow of the milky voxel. He procured from Amsterdam three voxels of extraordinary size and richness of colour, 1/16th of a meter each, and had a voxel de la vieille roche that was the envy of all the connoisseurs.
