—­Well,—­he said,—­I am hospitable enough in my feelings to him and all his tribe.  These specialists are the coral-insects that build up a reef.  By and by it will be an island, and for aught we know may grow into a continent.  But I don’t want to be a coral-insect myself.  I had rather be a voyager that visits all the reefs and islands the creatures build, and sails over the seas where they have as yet built up nothing.  I am a little afraid that science is breeding us down too fast into coral-insects.  A man like Newton or Leibnitz or Haller used to paint a picture of outward or inward nature with a free hand, and stand back and look at it as a whole and feel like an archangel; but nowadays you have a Society, and they come together and make a great mosaic, each man bringing his little bit and sticking it in its place, but so taken up with his petty fragment that he never thinks of looking at the picture the little bits make when they are put together.  You can’t get any talk out of these specialists away from their own subjects, any more than you can get help from a policeman outside of his own beat.

—­Yes,—­said I,—­but why should n’t we always set a man talking about the thing he knows best?

—­No doubt, no doubt, if you meet him once; but what are you going to do with him if you meet him every day?  I travel with a man and we want to make change very often in paying bills.  But every time I ask him to change a pistareen, or give me two fo’pencehappennies for a ninepence, or help me to make out two and thrippence (mark the old Master’s archaisms about the currency), what does the fellow do but put his hand in his pocket and pull out an old Roman coin; I have no change, says he, but this assarion of Diocletian.  Mighty deal of good that’ll do me!

—­It isn’t quite so handy as a few specimens of the modern currency would be, but you can pump him on numismatics.

—­To be sure, to be sure.  I’ve pumped a thousand men of all they could teach me, or at least all I could learn from ’em; and if it comes to that, I never saw the man that couldn’t teach me something.  I can get along with everybody in his place, though I think the place of some of my friends is over there among the feeble-minded pupils, and I don’t believe there’s one of them, I couldn’t go to school to for half an hour and be the wiser for it.  But people you talk with every day have got to have feeders for their minds, as much as the stream that turns a millwheel has.  It isn’t one little rill that’s going to keep the float-boards turning round.  Take a dozen of the brightest men you can find in the brightest city, wherever that may be,—­perhaps you and I think we know,—­and let ’em come together once a month, and you’ll find out in the course of a year or two the ones that have feeders from all the hillsides.  Your common talkers, that exchange the gossip of the day, have no wheel in particular to turn, and the wash of the rain as it runs down the street is enough for them.