self to, and ought to have studied exclusively. The beetles
proper are quite enough for the labor of one man's life. Call me a
Scarabaeist if you will; if I can prove myself worthy of that name, my
highest ambition will be more than satisfied.

I think, by way of compromise and convenience, I shall call him the
Scarabee. He has come to look wonderfully like those creatures,--the
beetles, I mean,--by being so much among them. His room is hung round
with cases of them, each impaled on a pin driven through him, something
as they used to bury suicides. These cases take the place for him
of pictures and all other ornaments. That Boy steals into his room
sometimes, and stares at them with great admiration, and has himself
undertaken to form a rival cabinet, chiefly consisting of flies, so far,
arranged in ranks superintended by an occasional spider.

The old Master, who is a bachelor, has a kindly feeling for this little
monkey, and those of his kind.

--I like children,--he said to me one day at table,--I like 'em, and I
respect 'em. Pretty much all the honest truth-telling there is in the
world is done by them. Do you know they play the part in the household
which the king's jester, who very often had a mighty long head under his
cap and bells, used to play for a monarch? There 's no radical club
like a nest of little folks in a nursery. Did you ever watch a baby's
fingers? I have, often enough, though I never knew what it was to own
one.--The Master paused half a minute or so,--sighed,--perhaps at
thinking what he had missed in life,--looked up at me a little vacantly.
I saw what was the matter; he had lost the thread of his talk.

--Baby's fingers,--I intercalated.

-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