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.