m is a painful one to some
persons. They have so closely associated life with its accidents that
they expect to see their departed friends in the costume of the time in
which they best remember them, and feel as if they should meet the spirit
of their grandfather with his wig and cane, as they habitually recall him
to memory.

The process of scientific specialization referred to and illustrated in
this record has been going on more actively than ever during these last
twenty years. We have only to look over the lists of the Faculties and
teachers of our Universities to see the subdivision of labor carried out
as never before. The movement is irresistible; it brings with it
exactness, exhaustive knowledge, a narrow but complete self-satisfaction,
with such accompanying faults as pedantry, triviality, and the kind of
partial blindness which belong to intellectual myopia. The specialist is
idealized almost into sublimity in Browning's "Burial of the Grammarian."
We never need fear that he will undervalue himself. To be the supreme
authority on anything is a satisfaction to self-love next door to the
precious delusions of dementia. I have never pictured a character more
contented with himself than the "Scarabee" of this story.

BEVERLY FARMS, MASS., August 1, 1891.
O. W. H.

THE POET

AT THE

BREAKFAST-TABLE.
I

The idea of a man's "interviewing" himself is rather odd, to be sure. But
then that is what we are all of us doing every day. I talk half the time
to find out my own thoughts, as a school-boy turns his pockets inside out
to see what is in them. One brings to light all sorts of personal
property he had forgotten in his inventory.

--You don't know what your thoughts are going to be beforehand? said the
"Member of the Haouse," as he calls himself.

--Why, of course I don't. Bless your honest legislative soul, I suppose
I have as many bound volumes of notions of one kind and another in my
head as you have in your Representatives' library up there at the State
House. I have to tumble them over and over, and open them in a hundred
places, and sometimes cut the leaves here and there, to find what I think
about this and that. And a good many people who flatter themselves they
are talking wisdom to me, are only helping me to get at the shelf and the
book and the page where I shall find my own opinion about the matter in
question.