One-story intellects, two—­story intellects, three story intellects with skylights.  All fact—­collectors, who have no aim beyond their facts, are one-story men.  Two-story men compare, reason, generalize, using the labors of the fact-collectors as well as their own.  Three-story men idealize, imagine, predict; their best illumination comes from above, through the skylight.  There are minds with large ground floors, that can store an infinite amount of knowledge; some librarians, for instance, who know enough of books to help other people, without being able to make much other use of their knowledge, have intellects of this class.  Your great working lawyer has two spacious stories; his mind is clear, because his mental floors are large, and he has room to arrange his thoughts so that he can get at them,—­facts below, principles above, and all in ordered series; poets are often narrow below, incapable of clear statement, and with small power of consecutive reasoning, but full of light, if sometimes rather bare of furniture, in the attics.

—­The old Master smiled.  I think he suspects himself of a three-story intellect, and I don’t feel sure that he is n’t right.

—­Is it dark meat or white meat you will be helped to?—­said the Landlady, addressing the Master.

—­Dark meat for me, always,—­he answered.  Then turning to me, he began one of those monologues of his, such as that which put the Member of the Haouse asleep the other day.

—­It ’s pretty much the same in men and women and in books and everything, that it is in turkeys and chickens.  Why, take your poets, now, say Browning and Tennyson.  Don’t you think you can say which is the dark-meat and which is the white-meat poet?  And so of the people you know; can’t you pick out the full-flavored, coarse-fibred characters from the delicate, fine-fibred ones?  And in the same person, don’t you know the same two shades in different parts of the character that you find in the wing and thigh of a partridge?  I suppose you poets may like white meat best, very probably; you had rather have a wing than a drumstick, I dare say.

—­Why, yes,—­said I,—­I suppose some of us do.  Perhaps it is because a bird flies with his white-fleshed limbs and walks with the dark-fleshed ones.  Besides, the wing-muscles are nearer the heart than the leg-muscles.

I thought that sounded mighty pretty, and paused a moment to pat myself on the back, as is my wont when I say something that I think of superior quality.  So I lost my innings; for the Master is apt to strike in at the end of a bar, instead of waiting for a rest, if I may borrow a musical phrase.  No matter, just at this moment, what he said; but he talked the Member of the Haouse asleep again.