ays perfectly serious to him; and he would
no more laugh over anything connected with his study, than a clergyman
would laugh at a funeral.

They send me all sorts of trumpery,--he said, Orthoptera and
Lepidoptera; as if a coleopterist--a scarabeeist--cared for such things.
This business is no boy's play to me. The insect population of the world
is not even catalogued yet, and a lifetime given to the scarabees 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 c