ated.

-Yes, yes; did you ever see how they will poke those wonderful little
fingers of theirs into every fold and crack and crevice they can get at?
That is their first education, feeling their way into the solid facts of
the material world. When they begin to talk it is the same thing over
again in another shape. If there is a crack or a flaw in your answer to
their confounded shoulder-hitting questions, they will poke and poke
until they have got it gaping just as the baby's fingers have made a rent
out of that atom of a hole in his pinafore that your old eyes never took
notice of. Then they make such fools of us by copying on a small scale
what we do in the grand manner. I wonder if it ever occurs to our
dried-up neighbor there to ask himself whether That Boy's collection of
flies is n't about as significant in the Order of Things as his own
Museum of Beetles?

--I couldn't help thinking that perhaps That Boy's questions about the
simpler mysteries of life might have a good deal of the same kind of
significance as the Master's inquiries into the Order of Things.

--On my left, beyond my next neighbor the Scarabee, at the end of the
table, sits a person of whom we know little, except that he carries about
him more palpable reminiscences of tobacco and the allied sources of
comfort than a very sensitive organization might find acceptable. The
Master does not seem to like him much, for some reason or other,--perhaps
he has a special aversion to the odor of tobacco. As his forefinger
shows a little too distinctly that he uses a pen, I shall compliment him
by calling him the Man of Letters, until I find out more about him.

--The Young Girl who sits on my right, next beyond the Master, can hardly
be more than nineteen or twenty years old. I wish I could paint her so
as to interest others as much as she does me. But she has not a
profusion of sunny tresses wreathing a neck of alabaster, and a cheek
where the rose and the lily are trying to settle their old quarrel with
alternating victory. Her hair is brown, her cheek is delicately pallid,
her forehead is too ample for a ball-room beauty's. A single faint line
between the eyebrows is the record of long--continued anxious efforts to
please in the task she has chosen, or rather which has been forced upon
her. It is the same line of anxious and conscientious effort which I saw
not long since on the forehead of one of the sweetest and truest singers
who has visi