-Not quite so ambitious as that, sir.  I should like to put my eyes on the individual entitled to that name!  A society may call itself an Entomological Society, but the man who arrogates such a broad title as that to himself, in the present state of science, is a pretender, sir, a dilettante, an impostor!  No man can be truly called an entomologist, sir; the subject is too vast for any single human intelligence to grasp.

—­May I venture to ask,—­I said, a little awed by his statement and manner,—­what is your special province of study?

I am often spoken of as a Coleopterist,—­he said,—­but I have no right to so comprehensive a name.  The genus Scarabaeus is what I have chiefly confined myself 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’s collection of flies is n’t about as significant in the Order of Things as his own Museum of Beetles?