-Wouldn’t do?—­said I,—­why not?  Don’t spiders have their mates as well as other folks?

-Oh yes, sometimes; but the females are apt to be particular, and if they don’t like the mate you offer them they fall upon him and kill him and eat him up.  You see they are a great deal bigger and stronger than the males, and they are always hungry and not always particularly anxious to have one of the other sex bothering round.

—­Woman’s rights!—­said I,—­there you have it!  Why don’t those talking ladies take a spider as their emblem?  Let them form arachnoid associations, spinsters and spiders would be a good motto.

—­The Master smiled.  I think it was an eleemosynary smile, for my pleasantry seems to me a particularly basso rilievo, as I look upon it in cold blood.  But conversation at the best is only a thin sprinkling of occasional felicities set in platitudes and commonplaces.  I never heard people talk like the characters in the “School for Scandal,”—­I should very much like to.—–­I say the Master smiled.  But the Scarabee did not relax a muscle of his countenance.

—­There are persons whom the very mildest of faecetiae sets off into such convulsions of laughter, that one is afraid lest they should injure themselves.  Even when a jest misses fire completely, so that it is no jest at all, but only a jocular intention, they laugh just as heartily.  Leave out the point of your story, get the word wrong on the duplicity of which the pun that was to excite hilarity depended, and they still honor your abortive attempt with the most lusty and vociferous merriment.

There is a very opposite class of persons whom anything in the nature of a joke perplexes, troubles, and even sometimes irritates, seeming to make them think they are trifled with, if not insulted.  If you are fortunate enough to set the whole table laughing, one of this class of persons will look inquiringly round, as if something had happened, and, seeing everybody apparently amused but himself, feel as if he was being laughed at, or at any rate as if something had been said which he was not to hear.  Often, however, it does not go so far as this, and there is nothing more than mere insensibility to the cause of other people’s laughter, a sort of joke-blindness, comparable to the well-known color-blindness with which many persons are afflicted as a congenital incapacity.

I have never seen the Scarabee smile.  I have seen him take off his goggles,—­he breakfasts in these occasionally,—­I suppose when he has been tiring his poor old eyes out over night gazing through his microscope,—­I have seen him take his goggles off, I say, and stare about him, when the rest of us were laughing at something which amused us, but his features betrayed nothing more than a certain bewilderment, as if we had been foreigners talking in an unknown tongue.  I do not think it was a mere fancy of mine that he bears a kind of resemblance to the tribe of insects he gives his life