IX

There was no sooner a vacancy on our side of the table, than the Master

proposed a change of seats which would bring the Young Astronomer into

our immediate neighborhood. The Scarabee was to move into the place of

our late unlamented associate, the Man of Letters, so called. I was to

take his place, the Master to take mine, and the young man that which

had been occupied by the Master. The advantages of this change were

obvious. The old Master likes an audience, plainly enough; and with

myself on one side of him, and the young student of science, whose

speculative turn is sufficiently shown in the passages from his poem,

on the other side, he may feel quite sure of being listened to. There

is only one trouble in the arrangement, and that is that it brings this

young man not only close to us, but also next to our Scheherezade.

I am obliged to confess that he has shown occasional marks of

inattention even while the Master was discoursing in a way that I found

agreeable enough. I am quite sure it is no intentional disrespect to the

old Master. It seems to me rather that he has become interested in the

astronomical lessons he has been giving the Young Girl. He has studied

so much alone, that it is naturally a pleasure to him to impart some of

his knowledge. As for his young pupil, she has often thought of being

a teacher herself, so that she is of course very glad to acquire any

accomplishment that may be useful to her in that capacity. I do not see

any reason why some of the boarders should have made such remarks as

they have done. One cannot teach astronomy to advantage, without going

out of doors, though I confess that when two young people go out by

daylight to study the stars, as these young folks have done once or

twice, I do not so much wonder at a remark or suggestion from those who

have nothing better to do than study their neighbors.

I ought to have told the reader before this that I found, as I

suspected, that our innocent-looking Scheherezade was at the bottom of

the popgun business. I watched her very closely, and one day, when the

little monkey made us all laugh by stopping the Member of the Haouse in

the middle of a speech he was repeating to us,--it was his great effort

of the season on a bill for the protection of horn-pout in Little Muddy

River,--I caught her making the signs that set him going. At a slight

tap of her knife against her plate, he got all ready, and presently I

saw her cross her knife and fork upon her plate, and as she did so, pop!

went the small piece of artillery. The Member of the Haouse was just

saying that this bill hit his constitooents in their most vital--when

a pellet hit him in the feature of his countenance most exposed to

aggressions and least tolerant of liberties. The Member resented this

unparliamentary treatment by jumping up from his chair and giving the

small aggressor a good shaking, at the same time seizing the implement

which had caused his wrath and breaking it into splinters. The Boy

blubbered, the Young Girl changed color, and looked as if she would cry,

and that was the last of these interruptions.

I must own that I have sometimes wished we had the popgun back, for it

answered all the purpose of “the previous question” in a deliberative

assembly. No doubt the Young Girl was capricious in setting the little

engine at work, but she cut short a good many disquisitions that

threatened to be tedious. I find myself often wishing for her and her

small fellow-conspirator's intervention, in company where I am supposed

to be enjoying myself. When my friend the politician gets too far into

the personal details of the quorum pars magna fui, I find myself all

at once exclaiming in mental articulation, Popgun! When my friend the

story-teller begins that protracted narrative which has often emptied

me of all my voluntary laughter for the evening, he has got but a very

little way when I say to myself, What wouldn't I give for a pellet from

that popgun! In short, so useful has that trivial implement proved as a

jaw-stopper and a boricide, that I never go to a club or a dinner-party,

without wishing the company included our Scheherezade and That Boy with

his popgun.

How clearly I see now into the mechanism of the Young Girl's audacious

contrivance for regulating our table-talk! Her brain is tired half

the time, and she is too nervous to listen patiently to what a quieter

person would like well enough, or at least would not be annoyed by. It

amused her to invent a scheme for managing the headstrong talkers, and

also let off a certain spirit of mischief which in some of these nervous

girls shows itself in much more questionable forms. How cunning these

half-hysteric young persons are, to be sure! I had to watch a long

time before I detected the telegraphic communication between the two

conspirators. I have no doubt she had sedulously schooled the little

monkey to his business, and found great delight in the task of

instruction.

But now that our Scheherezade has become a scholar instead of a teacher,

she seems to be undergoing a remarkable transformation. Astronomy is

indeed a noble science. It may well kindle the enthusiasm of a youthful

nature. I fancy at times that I see something of that starry light which

I noticed in the young man's eyes gradually kindling in hers. But can it

be astronomy alone that does it? Her color comes and goes more readily

than when the old Master sat next her on the left. It is having this

young man at her side, I suppose. Of course it is. I watch her with

great, I may say tender interest. If he would only fall in love with

her, seize upon her wandering affections and fancies as the Romans

seized the Sabine virgins, lift her out of herself and her listless and

weary drudgeries, stop the outflow of this young life which is draining

itself away in forced literary labor--dear me, dear me--if, if, if--

“If I were God

An' ye were Martin Elginbrod!”

I am afraid all this may never be. I fear that he is too much given to

lonely study, to self-companionship, to all sorts of questionings, to

looking at life as at a solemn show where he is only a spectator. I dare

not build up a romance on what I have yet seen. My reader may, but I

will answer for nothing. I shall wait and see.

The old Master and I have at last made that visit to the Scarabee which

we had so long promised ourselves.

When we knocked at his door he came and opened it, instead of saying,

Come in. He was surprised, I have no doubt, at the sound of our

footsteps; for he rarely has a visitor, except the little monkey of a

boy, and he may have thought a troop of marauders were coming to rob

him of his treasures. Collectors feel so rich in the possession of their

rarer specimens, that they forget how cheap their precious things

seem to common eyes, and are as afraid of being robbed as if they were

dealers in diamonds. They have the name of stealing from each other

now and then, it is true, but many of their priceless possessions would

hardly tempt a beggar. Values are artificial: you will not be able to

get ten cents of the year 1799 for a dime.

The Scarabee was reassured as soon as he saw our faces, and he welcomed

us not ungraciously into his small apartment. It was hard to find a

place to sit down, for all the chairs were already occupied by cases and

boxes full of his favorites. I began, therefore, looking round the room.

Bugs of every size and aspect met my eyes wherever they turned. I felt

for the moment as I suppose a man may feel in a fit of delirium tremens.

Presently my attention was drawn towards a very odd-looking insect on

the mantelpiece. This animal was incessantly raising its arms as if

towards heaven and clasping them together, as though it were wrestling

in prayer.

Do look at this creature,--I said to the Master, he seems to be very

hard at work at his devotions.

Mantas religiosa,--said the Master,--I know the praying rogue. Mighty

devout and mighty cruel; crushes everything he can master, or impales

it on his spiny shanks and feeds upon it, like a gluttonous wretch as

he is. I have seen the Mantis religiosa on a larger scale than this, now

and then. A sacred insect, sir,--sacred to many tribes of men; to the

Hottentots, to the Turks, yes, sir, and to the Frenchmen, who call the

rascal prie dieu, and believe him to have special charge of children

that have lost their way.

Doesn't it seem as if there was a vein of satire as well as of fun

that ran through the solemn manifestations of creative wisdom? And of

deception too--do you see how nearly those dried leaves resemble an

insect?

They do, indeed,--I answered,--but not so closely as to deceive me. They

remind me of an insect, but I could not mistake them for one.

--Oh, you couldn't mistake those dried leaves for an insect, hey? Well,

how can you mistake that insect for dried leaves? That is the question;

for insect it is,--phyllum siccifolium, the “walking leaf,” as some have

called it.--The Master had a hearty laugh at my expense.

The Scarabee did not seem to be amused at the Master's remarks or at

my blunder. Science is always 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 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 something as much

like a look of triumph as his dry face permitted,--not uncivil at all,

but a rather extraordinary question to ask at this date of entomological

history. I settled that question some years ago, by a series of

dissections, six-and-thirty in number, reported in an essay I can show

you and would give you a copy of, but that I am a little restricted in

my revenue, and our Society has to be economical, so I have but this

one. You see, sir,--and he went on with elytra and antennae and tarsi

and metatarsi and tracheae and stomata and wing-muscles and leg-muscles

and ganglions,--all plain enough, I do not doubt, to those accustomed

to handling dor-bugs and squash-bugs and such undesirable objects of

affection to all but naturalists.

He paused when he got through, not for an answer, for there evidently

was none, but to see how the Master would take it. The Scarabee had had

it all his own way.

The Master was loyal to his own generous nature. He felt as a peaceful

citizen might feel who had squared off at a stranger for some supposed

wrong, and suddenly discovered that he was undertaking to chastise Mr.

Dick Curtis, “the pet of the Fancy,” or Mr. Joshua Hudson; “the John

Bull fighter.”

He felt the absurdity of his discomfiture, for he turned to me

good-naturedly, and said,

“Poor Johnny Raw! What madness could impel

So rum a flat to face so prime a swell?”

To tell the truth, I rather think the Master enjoyed his own defeat. The

Scarabee had a right to his victory; a man does not give his life to the

study of a single limited subject for nothing, and the moment we come

across a first-class expert we begin to take a pride in his superiority.

It cannot offend us, who have no right at all to be his match on his

own ground. Besides, there is a very curious sense of satisfaction

in getting a fair chance to sneer at ourselves and scoff at our own

pretensions. The first person of our dual consciousness has been

smirking and rubbing his hands and felicitating himself on his

innumerable superiorities, until we have grown a little tired of him.

Then, when the other fellow, the critic, the cynic, the Shimei, who has

been quiet, letting self-love and self-glorification have their perfect

work, opens fire upon the first half of our personality and overwhelms

it with that wonderful vocabulary of abuse of which he is the unrivalled

master, there is no denying that he enjoys it immensely; and as he is

ourself for the moment, or at least the chief portion of ourself (the

other half-self retiring into a dim corner of semiconsciousness and

cowering under the storm of sneers and contumely,--you follow me

perfectly, Beloved,--the way is as plain as the path of the babe to the

maternal fount), as, I say, the abusive fellow is the chief part of us

for the time, and he likes to exercise his slanderous vocabulary, we on

the whole enjoy a brief season of self-depreciation and self-scolding

very heartily.

It is quite certain that both of us, the Master and myself, conceived on

the instant a respect for the Scarabee which we had not before felt.

He had grappled with one difficulty at any rate and mastered it. He had

settled one thing, at least, so it appeared, in such a way that it was

not to be brought up again. And now he was determined, if it cost him

the effort of all his remaining days, to close another discussion and

put forever to rest the anxious doubts about the larva of meloe.

--Your thirty-six dissections must have cost you a deal of time and

labor,--the Master said.

--What have I to do with time, but to fill it up with labor?--answered

the Scarabee.--It is my meat and drink to work over my beetles. My

holidays are when I get a rare specimen. My rest is to watch the habits

of insects, those that I do not pretend to study. Here is my muscarium,

my home for house-flies; very interesting creatures; here they breed and

buzz and feed and enjoy themselves, and die in a good old age of a few

months. My favorite insect lives in this other case; she is at home, but

in her private-chamber; you shall see her.

He tapped on the glass lightly, and a large, gray, hairy spider came

forth from the hollow of a funnel-like web.

--And this is all the friend you have to love? said the Master, with a

tenderness in his voice which made the question very significant.

--Nothing else loves me better than she does, that I know of,--he

answered.

--To think of it! Not even a dog to lick his hand, or a cat to purr

and rub her fur against him! Oh, these boarding-houses, these

boarding-houses! What forlorn people one sees stranded on their desolate

shores! Decayed gentlewomen with the poor wrecks of what once made their

households beautiful, disposed around them in narrow chambers as they

best may be, coming down day after day, poor souls! to sit at the board

with strangers; their hearts full of sad memories which have no language

but a sigh, no record but the lines of sorrow on their features;

orphans, creatures with growing tendrils and nothing to cling to; lonely

rich men, casting about them what to do with the wealth they never

knew how to enjoy, when they shall no longer worry over keeping and

increasing it; young men and young women, left to their instincts,

unguarded, unwatched, save by malicious eyes, which are sure to be

found and to find occupation in these miscellaneous collections of human

beings; and now and then a shred of humanity like this little adust

specialist, with just the resources needed to keep the “radical

moisture” from entirely exhaling from his attenuated organism, and

busying himself over a point of science, or compiling a hymn-book,

or editing a grammar or a dictionary;--such are the tenants of

boarding-houses whom we cannot think of without feeling how sad it is

when the wind is not tempered to the shorn lamb; when the solitary,

whose hearts are shrivelling, are not set in families!

The Master was greatly interested in the Scarabee's Muscarium.

--I don't remember,--he said,--that I have heard of such a thing as that

before. Mighty curious creatures, these same house-flies! Talk about

miracles! Was there ever anything more miraculous, so far as our common

observation goes, than the coming and the going of these creatures? Why

didn't Job ask where the flies come from and where they go to? I did

not say that you and I don't know, but how many people do know anything

about it? Where are the cradles of the young flies? Where are the

cemeteries of the dead ones, or do they die at all except when we kill

them? You think all the flies of the year are dead and gone, and there

comes a warm day and all at once there is a general resurrection of 'em;

they had been taking a nap, that is all.

--I suppose you do not trust your spider in the Muscarium?--said I,

addressing the Scarabee.

--Not exactly,--he answered,--she is a terrible creature. She loves

me, I think, but she is a killer and a cannibal among other insects. I

wanted to pair her with 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 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 had been foreigners talking in an unknown tongue. I do not

think it was a mere fancy of mine that he bears a kind of resemblance

to the tribe of insects he gives his life to studying. His shiny black

coat; his rounded back, convex with years of stooping over his minute

work; his angular movements, made natural to him by his habitual style

of manipulation; the aridity of his organism, with which his voice is

in perfect keeping;--all these marks of his special sedentary occupation

are so nearly what might be expected, and indeed so much, in accordance

with the more general fact that a man's aspect is subdued to the look

of what he works in, that I do not feel disposed to accuse myself of

exaggeration in my account of the Scarabee's appearance. But I think

he has learned something else of his coleopterous friends. The beetles

never smile. Their physiognomy is not adapted to the display of the

emotions; the lateral movement of their jaws being effective for

alimentary purposes, but very limited in its gamut of expression. It is

with these unemotional beings that the Scarabee passes his life. He has

but one object, and that is perfectly serious, to his mind, in fact,

of absorbing interest and importance. In one aspect of the matter he is

quite right, for if the Creator has taken the trouble to make one of His

creatures in just such a way and not otherwise, from the beginning of

its existence on our planet in ages of unknown remoteness to the present

time, the man who first explains His idea to us is charged with a

revelation. It is by no means impossible that there may be angels in

the celestial hierarchy to whom it would be new and interesting. I have

often thought that spirits of a higher order than man might be willing

to learn something from a human mind like that of Newton, and I see no

reason why an angelic being might not be glad to hear a lecture from Mr.

Huxley, or Mr. Tyndall, or one of our friends at Cambridge.

I have been sinuous as the Links of Forth seen from Stirling Castle,

or as that other river which threads the Berkshire valley and runs, a

perennial stream, through my memory,--from which I please myself with

thinking that I have learned to wind without fretting against the shore,

or forgetting cohere I am flowing,--sinuous, I say, but not jerky,--no,

not jerky nor hard to follow for a reader of the right sort, in the

prime of life and full possession of his or her faculties.

--All this last page or so, you readily understand, has been my

private talk with you, the Reader. The cue of the conversation which

I interrupted by this digression is to be found in the words “a good

motto;” from which I begin my account of the visit again.

--Do you receive many visitors,--I mean vertebrates, not articulates?

--said the Master.

I thought this question might perhaps bring il disiato riso, the

long-wished-for smile, but the Scarabee interpreted it in the simplest

zoological sense, and neglected its hint of playfulness with the most

absolute unconsciousness, apparently, of anything not entirely serious

and literal.

--You mean friends, I suppose,--he answered.--I have correspondents, but

I have no friends except this spider. I live alone, except when I go to

my subsection meetings; I get a box of insects now and then, and send

a few beetles to coleopterists in other entomological districts; but

science is exacting, and a man that wants to leave his record has not

much time for friendship. There is no great chance either for making

friends among naturalists. People that are at work on different things

do not care a great deal for each other's specialties, and people that

work on the same thing are always afraid lest one should get ahead of

the other, or steal some of his ideas before he has made them public.

There are none too many people you can trust in your laboratory. I

thought I had a friend once, but he watched me at work and stole the

discovery of a new species from me, and, what is more, had it named

after himself. Since that time I have liked spiders better than men.

They are hungry and savage, but at any rate they spin their own webs out

of their own insides. I like very well to talk with gentlemen that play

with my branch of entomology; I do not doubt it amused you, and if you

want to see anything I can show you, I shall have no scruple in letting

you see it. I have never had any complaint to make of amatoors.

--Upon my honor,--I would hold my right hand up and take my Bible-oath,

if it was not busy with the pen at this moment,--I do not believe the

Scarabee had the least idea in the world of the satire on the student of

the Order of Things implied in his invitation to the “amatoor.” As for

the Master, he stood fire perfectly, as he always does; but the idea

that he, who had worked a considerable part of several seasons at

examining and preparing insects, who believed himself to have given a

new tabanus to the catalogue of native diptera, the idea that he was

playing with science, and might be trusted anywhere as a harmless

amateur, from whom no expert could possibly fear any anticipation of his

unpublished discoveries, went beyond anything set down in that book of

his which contained so much of the strainings of his wisdom.

The poor little Scarabee began fidgeting round about this time, and

uttering some half-audible words, apologetical, partly, and involving an

allusion to refreshments. As he spoke, he opened a small cupboard, and

as he did so out bolted an uninvited tenant of the same, long in person,

sable in hue, and swift of movement, on seeing which the Scarabee simply

said, without emotion, blatta, but I, forgetting what was due to good

manners, exclaimed cockroach!

We could not make up our minds to tax the Scarabee's hospitality,

already levied upon by the voracious articulate. So we both alleged a

state of utter repletion, and did not solve the mystery of the contents

of the cupboard,--not too luxurious, it may be conjectured, and yet

kindly offered, so that we felt there was a moist filament of the

social instinct running like a nerve through that exsiccated and almost

anhydrous organism.

We left him with professions of esteem and respect which were real. We

had gone, not to scoff, but very probably to smile, and I will not say

we did not. But the Master was more thoughtful than usual.

--If I had not solemnly dedicated myself to the study of the Order of

Things,--he said,--I do verily believe I would give what remains to

me of life to the investigation of some single point I could utterly

eviscerate and leave finally settled for the instruction and, it may be,

the admiration of all coming time. The keel ploughs ten thousand leagues

of ocean and leaves no trace of its deep-graven furrows. The chisel

scars only a few inches on the face of a rock, but the story it has

traced is read by a hundred generations. The eagle leaves no track of

his path, no memory of the place where he built his nest; but a patient

mollusk has bored a little hole in a marble column of the temple of

Serapis, and the monument of his labor outlasts the altar and the statue

of the divinity.

--Whew!--said I to myself,--that sounds a little like what we college

boys used to call a “squirt.”--The Master guessed my thought and said,

smiling,

--That is from one of my old lectures. A man's tongue wags along quietly

enough, but his pen begins prancing as soon as it touches paper. I know

what you are thinking--you're thinking this is a squirt. That word has

taken the nonsense out of a good many high-stepping fellows. But it

did a good deal of harm too, and it was a vulgar lot that applied it

oftenest.

I am at last perfectly satisfied that our Landlady has no designs on

the Capitalist, and as well convinced that any fancy of mine that he

was like to make love to her was a mistake. The good woman is too much

absorbed in her children, and more especially in “the Doctor,” as

she delights to call her son, to be the prey of any foolish desire of

changing her condition. She is doing very well as it is, and if the

young man succeeds, as I have little question that he will, I think it

probable enough that she will retire from her position as the head of

a boarding-house. We have all liked the good woman who have lived with

her,--I mean we three friends who have put ourselves on record. Her

talk, I must confess, is a little diffuse and not always absolutely

correct, according to the standard of the great Worcester; she is

subject to lachrymose cataclysms and semiconvulsive upheavals when she

reverts in memory to her past trials, and especially when she recalls

the virtues of her deceased spouse, who was, I suspect, an adjunct such

as one finds not rarely annexed to a capable matron in charge of an

establishment like hers; that is to say, an easy-going, harmless,

fetch-and-carry, carve-and-help, get-out-of-the-way kind of neuter, who

comes up three times (as they say drowning people do) every day, namely,

at breakfast, dinner, and tea, and disappears, submerged beneath the

waves of life, during the intervals of these events.

It is a source of genuine delight to me, who am of a kindly nature

enough, according to my own reckoning, to watch the good woman, and see

what looks of pride and affection she bestows upon her Benjamin, and

how, in spite of herself, the maternal feeling betrays its influence in

her dispensations of those delicacies which are the exceptional element

in our entertainments. I will not say that Benjamin's mess, like his

Scripture namesake's, is five times as large as that of any of the

others, for this would imply either an economical distribution to the

guests in general or heaping the poor young man's plate in a way that

would spoil the appetite of an Esquimau, but you may be sure he fares

well if anybody does; and I would have you understand that our Landlady

knows what is what as well as who is who.

I begin really to entertain very sanguine expectations of young Doctor

Benjamin Franklin. He has lately been treating a patient of whose

good-will may prove of great importance to him. The Capitalist hurt one

of his fingers somehow or other, and requested our young doctor to take

a look at it. The young doctor asked nothing better than to take charge

of the case, which proved more serious than might have been at first

expected, and kept him in attendance more than a week. There was one

very odd thing about it. The Capitalist seemed to have an idea that he

was like to be ruined in the matter of bandages,--small strips of worn

linen which any old woman could have spared him from her rag-bag, but

which, with that strange perversity which long habits of economy give

to a good many elderly people, he seemed to think were as precious as

if they had been turned into paper and stamped with promises to pay in

thousands, from the national treasury. It was impossible to get this

whim out of him, and the young doctor had tact enough to humor him in

it. All this did not look very promising for the state of mind in which

the patient was like to receive his bill for attendance when that should

be presented. Doctor Benjamin was man enough, however, to come up to the

mark, and sent him in such an account as it was becoming to send a

man of ample means who had been diligently and skilfully cared for. He

looked forward with some uncertainty as to how it would be received.

Perhaps his patient would try to beat him down, and Doctor Benjamin made

up his mind to have the whole or nothing. Perhaps he would pay the whole

amount, but with a look, and possibly a word, that would make every

dollar of it burn like a blister.

Doctor Benjamin's conjectures were not unnatural, but quite remote from

the actual fact. As soon as his patient had got entirely well, the young

physician sent in his bill. The Capitalist requested him to step into

his room with him, and paid the full charge in the handsomest and most

gratifying way, thanking him for his skill and attention, and assuring

him that he had had great satisfaction in submitting himself to such

competent hands, and should certainly apply to him again in case he

should have any occasion for a medical adviser. We must not be too

sagacious in judging people by the little excrescences of their

character. Ex pede Herculem may often prove safe enough, but ex verruca

Tullium is liable to mislead a hasty judge of his fellow-men.

I have studied the people called misers and thought a good deal about

them. In former years I used to keep a little gold by me in order to

ascertain for myself exactly the amount of pleasure to be got out of

handling it; this being the traditional delight of the old-fashioned

miser. It is by no means to be despised. Three or four hundred dollars

in double-eagles will do very well to experiment on. There is something

very agreeable in the yellow gleam, very musical in the metallic clink,

very satisfying in the singular weight, and very stimulating in

the feeling that all the world over these same yellow disks are the

master-keys that let one in wherever he wants to go, the servants that

bring him pretty nearly everything he wants, except virtue,--and a good

deal of what passes for that. I confess, then, to an honest liking for

the splendors and the specific gravity and the manifold potentiality of

the royal metal, and I understand, after a certain imperfect fashion,

the delight that an old ragged wretch, starving himself in a crazy

hovel, takes in stuffing guineas into old stockings and filling earthen

pots with sovereigns, and every now and then visiting his hoards and

fingering the fat pieces, and thinking ever all that they represent of

earthly and angelic and diabolic energy. A miser pouring out his guineas

into his palm and bathing his shrivelled and trembling hands in the

yellow heaps before him, is not the prosaic being we are in the habit of

thinking him. He is a dreamer, almost a poet. You and I read a novel or

a poem to help our imaginations to build up palaces, and transport us

into the emotional states and the felicitous conditions of the ideal

characters pictured in the book we are reading. But think of him and the

significance of the symbols he is handling as compared with the empty

syllables and words we are using to build our aerial edifices with!

In this hand he holds the smile of beauty and in that the dagger of

revenge. The contents of that old glove will buy him the willing service

of many an adroit sinner, and with what that coarse sack contains he can

purchase the prayers of holy men for all succeeding time. In this chest

is a castle in Spain, a real one, and not only in Spain, but anywhere

he will choose to have it. If he would know what is the liberality of

judgment of any of the straiter sects, he has only to hand over that box

of rouleaux to the trustees of one of its educational institutions for

the endowment of two or three professorships. If he would dream of being

remembered by coming generations, what monument so enduring as a college

building that shall bear his name, and even when its solid masonry shall

crumble give place to another still charged with the same sacred duty

of perpetuating his remembrance. Who was Sir Matthew Holworthy, that his

name is a household word on the lips of thousands of scholars, and will

be centuries hence, as that of Walter de Merton, dead six hundred years

ago, is to-day at Oxford? Who was Mistress Holden, that she should be

blessed among women by having her name spoken gratefully and the

little edifice she caused to be erected preserved as her monument from

generation to generation? All these possibilities, the lust of the eye,

the lust of the flesh, the pride of life; the tears of grateful orphans

by the gallon; the prayers of Westminster Assembly's Catechism divines

by the thousand; the masses of priests by the century;--all these

things, and more if more there be that the imagination of a lover of

gold is likely to range over, the miser hears and sees and feels and

hugs and enjoys as he paddles with his lean hands among the sliding,

shining, ringing, innocent-looking bits of yellow metal, toying with

them as the lion-tamer handles the great carnivorous monster, whose

might and whose terrors are child's play to the latent forces and power

of harm-doing of the glittering counters played with in the great game

between angels and devils.

I have seen a good deal of misers, and I think I understand them as

well as most persons do. But the Capitalist's economy in rags and his

liberality to the young doctor are very oddly contrasted with each

other. I should not be surprised at any time to hear that he had endowed

a scholarship or professorship or built a college dormitory, in spite of

his curious parsimony in old linen.

I do not know where our Young Astronomer got the notions that he

expresses so freely in the lines that follow. I think the statement is

true, however, which I see in one of the most popular Cyclopaedias, that

“the non-clerical mind in all ages is disposed to look favorably upon

the doctrine of the universal restoration to holiness and happiness of

all fallen intelligences, whether human or angelic.” Certainly, most

of the poets who have reached the heart of men, since Burns dropped the

tear for poor “auld Nickie-ben” that softened the stony-hearted theology

of Scotland, have had “non-clerical” minds, and I suppose our young

friend is in his humble way an optimist like them. What he says in verse

is very much the same thing as what is said in prose in all companies,

and thought by a great many who are thankful to anybody that will say

it for them,--not a few clerical as wall as “non-clerical” persons among

them.