rabees is a small
contribution enough to their study. I like your men of general
intelligence well enough,--your Linnwuses and your Buffons and your
Cuviers; but Cuvier had to go to Latreille for his insects, and if
Latreille had been able to consult me,--yes, me, gentlemen!--he would n't
have made the blunders he did about some of the coleoptera.

The old Master, as I think you must have found out by this time,--you,
Beloved, I mean, who read every word,--has a reasonably good opinion, as
perhaps he has a right to have, of his own intelligence and acquirements.
The Scarabee's exultation and glow as he spoke of the errors of the great
entomologist which he himself could have corrected, had the effect on the
old Master which a lusty crow has upon the feathered champion of the
neighboring barnyard. He too knew something about insects. Had he not
discovered a, new tabanus? Had he not made preparations of the very
coleoptera the Scarabee studied so exclusively,--preparations which the
illustrious Swammerdam would not have been ashamed of, and dissected a
melolontha as exquisitely as Strauss Durckheim himself ever did it? So
the Master, recalling these studies of his and certain difficult and
disputed points at which he had labored in one of his entomological
paroxysms, put a question which there can be little doubt was intended to
puzzle the Scarabee, and perhaps,--for the best of us is human (I am
beginning to love the old Master, but he has his little weaknesses, thank
Heaven, like the rest of us),--I say perhaps, was meant to show that some
folks knew as much about some things as some other folks.

The little dried-up specialist did not dilate into fighting dimensions
as--perhaps, again--the Master may have thought he would. He looked a
mild surprise, but remained as quiet as one of his own beetles when you
touch him and he makes believe he is dead. The blank silence became
oppressive. Was the Scarabee crushed, as so many of his namesakes are
crushed, under the heel of this trampling omniscient?

At last the Scarabee creaked out very slowly, "Did I understand you to
ask the following question, to wit?" and so forth; for I was quite out of
my depth, and only know that he repeated the Master's somewhat complex
inquiry, word for word.

--That was exactly my question,--said the Master,--and I hope it is not
uncivil to ask one which seems to me to be a puzzler.

Not uncivil in the least,--said the Scarabee, with so