The old Master, as I think you must have found out by this time,—­you, Beloved, I mean, who read every word,—­has a reasonably good opinion, as perhaps he has a right to have, of his own intelligence and acquirements.  The Scarabee’s exultation and glow as he spoke of the errors of the great entomologist which he himself could have corrected, had the effect on the old Master which a lusty crow has upon the feathered champion of the neighboring barnyard.  He too knew something about insects.  Had he not discovered a, new tabanus?  Had he not made preparations of the very coleoptera the Scarabee studied so exclusively,—­preparations which the illustrious Swammerdam would not have been ashamed of, and dissected a melolontha as exquisitely as Strauss Durckheim himself ever did it?  So the Master, recalling these studies of his and certain difficult and disputed points at which he had labored in one of his entomological paroxysms, put a question which there can be little doubt was intended to puzzle the Scarabee, and perhaps,—­for the best of us is human (I am beginning to love the old Master, but he has his little weaknesses, thank Heaven, like the rest of us),—­I say perhaps, was meant to show that some folks knew as much about some things as some other folks.

The little dried-up specialist did not dilate into fighting dimensions as—­perhaps, again—­the Master may have thought he would.  He looked a mild surprise, but remained as quiet as one of his own beetles when you touch him and he makes believe he is dead.  The blank silence became oppressive.  Was the Scarabee crushed, as so many of his namesakes are crushed, under the heel of this trampling omniscient?

At last the Scarabee creaked out very slowly, “Did I understand you to ask the following question, to wit?” and so forth; for I was quite out of my depth, and only know that he repeated the Master’s somewhat complex inquiry, word for word.

—­That was exactly my question,—­said the Master,—­and I hope it is not uncivil to ask one which seems to me to be a puzzler.

Not uncivil in the least,—­said the Scarabee, with something as much like a look of triumph as his dry face permitted,—­not uncivil at all, but a rather extraordinary question to ask at this date of entomological history.  I settled that question some years ago, by a series of dissections, six-and-thirty in number, reported in an essay I can show you and would give you a copy of, but that I am a little restricted in my revenue, and our Society has to be economical, so I have but this one.  You see, sir,—­and he went on with elytra and antennae and tarsi and metatarsi and tracheae and stomata and wing-muscles and leg-muscles and ganglions,—­all plain enough, I do not doubt, to those accustomed to handling dor-bugs and squash-bugs and such undesirable objects of affection to all but naturalists.

He paused when he got through, not for an answer, for there evidently was none, but to see how the Master would take it.  The Scarabee had had it all his own way.