We listened to these lines in silence.  They were evidently written honestly, and with feeling, and no doubt meant to be reverential.  I thought, however, the Lady looked rather serious as he finished reading.  The Young Girl’s cheeks were flushed, but she was not in the mood for criticism.

As we came away the Master said to me—­The stubble-fields are mighty slow to take fire.  These young fellows catch up with the world’s ideas one after another,—­they have been tamed a long while, but they find them running loose in their minds, and think they are ferae naturae.  They remind me of young sportsmen who fire at the first feathers they see, and bring down a barnyard fowl.  But the chicken may be worth bagging for all that, he said, good-humoredly.

X

Caveat Lector.  Let the reader look out for himself.  The old Master, whose words I have so frequently quoted and shall quote more of, is a dogmatist who lays down the law, ex cathedra, from the chair of his own personality.  I do not deny that he has the ambition of knowing something about a greater number of subjects than any one man ought to meddle with, except in a very humble and modest way.  And that is not his way.  There was no doubt something of, humorous bravado in his saying that the actual “order of things” did not offer a field sufficiently ample for his intelligence.  But if I found fault with him, which would be easy enough, I should say that he holds and expresses definite opinions about matters that he could afford to leave open questions, or ask the judgment of others about.  But I do not want to find fault with him.  If he does not settle all the points he speaks of so authoritatively, he sets me thinking about them, and I like a man as a companion who is not afraid of a half-truth.  I know he says some things peremptorily that he may inwardly debate with himself.  There are two ways of dealing with assertions of this kind.  One may attack them on the false side and perhaps gain a conversational victory.  But I like better to take them up on the true side and see how much can be made of that aspect of the dogmatic assertion.  It is the only comfortable way of dealing with persons like the old Master.

There have been three famous talkers in Great Britain, either of whom would illustrate what I say about dogmatists well enough for my purpose.  You cannot doubt to what three I refer:  Samuel the First, Samuel the Second, and Thomas, last of the Dynasty. (I mean the living Thomas and not Thomas B.)

I say the last of the Dynasty, for the conversational dogmatist on the imperial scale becomes every year more and more an impossibility.  If he is in intelligent company he will be almost sure to find some one who knows more about some of the subjects he generalizes upon than any wholesale thinker who handles knowledge by the cargo is like to know.  I find myself, at certain intervals, in the society of a number of