ungry and not always particularly anxious to
have one of the other sex bothering round.

--Woman's rights!--said I,--there you have it! Why don't those talking
ladies take a spider as their emblem? Let them form arachnoid
associations, spinsters and spiders would be a good motto.

--The Master smiled. I think it was an eleemosynary smile, for my
pleasantry seems to me a particularly basso rilievo, as I look upon it in
cold blood. But conversation at the best is only a thin sprinkling of
occasional felicities set in platitudes and commonplaces. I never heard
people talk like the characters in the "School for Scandal,"--I should
very much like to.---I say the Master smiled. But the Scarabee did not
relax a muscle of his countenance.

--There are persons whom the very mildest of faecetiae sets off into such
convulsions of laughter, that one is afraid lest they should injure
themselves. Even when a jest misses fire completely, so that it is no
jest at all, but only a jocular intention, they laugh just as heartily.
Leave out the point of your story, get the word wrong on the duplicity of
which the pun that was to excite hilarity depended, and they still honor
your abortive attempt with the most lusty and vociferous merriment.

There is a very opposite class of persons whom anything in the nature of
a joke perplexes, troubles, and even sometimes irritates, seeming to make
them think they are trifled with, if not insulted. If you are fortunate
enough to set the whole table laughing, one of this class of persons will
look inquiringly round, as if something had happened, and, seeing
everybody apparently amused but himself, feel as if he was being laughed
at, or at any rate as if something had been said which he was not to
hear. Often, however, it does not go so far as this, and there is
nothing more than mere insensibility to the cause of other people's
laughter, a sort of joke-blindness, comparable to the well-known
color-blindness with which many persons are afflicted as a congenital
incapacity.

I have never seen the Scarabee smile. I have seen him take off his
goggles,--he breakfasts in these occasionally,--I suppose when he has
been tiring his poor old eyes out over night gazing through his
microscope,--I have seen him take his goggles off, I say, and stare about
him, when the rest of us were laughing at something which amused us, but
his features betrayed nothing more than a certain bewilderment, as if we
ha