th a male spider, but it wouldn't do.

-Wouldn't do?--said I,--why not? Don't spiders have their mates as well
as other folks?

-Oh yes, sometimes; but the females are apt to be particular, and if
they don't like the mate you offer them they fall upon him and kill him
and eat him up. You see they are a great deal bigger and stronger
than the males, and they are always hungry 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