Skins of the Dermestes lardaraus,—­said the Scarabee,—­you can always tell them by those brown hairy coats.  That ’s the name to give them.

—­What good does it do to give ’em a name after they ’ve eat the binding off my folios?—­asked the Register of Deeds.

The Scarabee had too much respect for science to answer such a question as that; and the book, having served its purposes, was passed back to the Lady.

I return to the previous question,—­said I,—­if our friend the Member of the House of Representatives will allow me to borrow the phrase.  Womanly women are very kindly critics, except to themselves and now and then to their own sex.  The less there is of sex about a woman, the more she is to be dreaded.  But take a real woman at her best moment,—­well dressed enough to be pleased with herself, not so resplendent as to be a show and a sensation, with those varied outside influences which set vibrating the harmonic notes of her nature stirring in the air about her, and what has social life to compare with one of those vital interchanges of thought and feeling with her that make an hour memorable?  What can equal her tact, her delicacy, her subtlety of apprehension, her quickness to feel the changes of temperature as the warm and cool currents of talk blow by turns?  At one moment she is microscopically intellectual, critical, scrupulous in judgment as an analyst’s balance, and the next as sympathetic as the open rose that sweetens the wind from whatever quarter it finds its way to her bosom.  It is in the hospitable soul of a woman that a man forgets he is a stranger, and so becomes natural and truthful, at the same time that he is mesmerized by all those divine differences which make her a mystery and a bewilderment to—­

If you fire your popgun at me, you little chimpanzee, I will stick a pin right through the middle of you and put you into one of this gentleman’s beetle-cases!

I caught the imp that time, but what started him was more than I could guess.  It is rather hard that this spoiled child should spoil such a sentence as that was going to be; but the wind shifted all at once, and the talk had to come round on another tack, or at least fall off a point or two from its course.

—­I’ll tell you who I think are the best talkers in all probability, —­said I to the Master, who, as I mentioned, was developing interesting talent as a listener,—­poets who never write verses.  And there are a good many more of these than it would seem at first sight.  I think you may say every young lover is a poet, to begin with.  I don’t mean either that all young lovers are good talkers,—­they have an eloquence all their own when they are with the beloved object, no doubt, emphasized after the fashion the solemn bard of Paradise refers to with such delicious humor in the passage we just heard,—­but a little talk goes a good way in most of these cooing matches, and it wouldn’t do to report them too