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Here are my bee-parasites, said the Scarabee, showing me a box full of glass slides, each with a specimen ready mounted for the microscope. I was most struck with one little beast flattened out like a turtle, semi-transparent, six-legged, as I remember him, and every leg terminated by a single claw hooked like a lion's and as formidable for the size of the creature as that of the royal beast.
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.
Call me a Scarabaeist if you will; if I can prove myself worthy of that name, my highest ambition will be more than satisfied. I think, by way of compromise and convenience, I shall call him the Scarabee. He has come to look wonderfully like those creatures, the beetles, I mean, by being so much among them.
Oh, I don't know much about that, but I think he is the best cared for, on the whole, of any animal that I know of; and if I wasn't a man I believe I had rather be that little sybarite than anything that feasts at the board of nature. The question is, whether he is the larva of meloe, the Scarabee said, as if he had not heard a word of what I had just been saying.
I must get a peep through that microscope of his and see the pediculus which occupies a larger space in his mental vision than the midnight march of the solar systems. You ought to have seen the way in which the poor dried-up little Scarabee turned towards me.
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? The little dried-up specialist did not dilate into fighting dimensions as perhaps, again the Master may have thought he would.
You would like to see, I don't doubt, how we sit at the table, and I will help you by means of a diagram which shows the present arrangement of our seats. The Poet. 2. The Master Of Arts. 3. The Lady. 5. The Landlady. 6. Dr. B. Franklin. 7. That Boy. 8. The Astronomer. 9. The Member of the Haouse. 10. The Register of Deeds. 11. The Salesman. 12. The Capitalist. 13. The Scarabee.
The hot sun, falling upon the boat, made its brown, wet sides sparkle like the brilliant wings of some gigantic scarabee; and, upon the patched, scorched deck, six or seven half-naked, sunburned children, boys and girls, played at the feet of a bundle of rags and brown flesh, which was a woman, a young woman, but prematurely old and wasted, who was nursing a little baby.
That is the question; for insect it is, phyllum siccifolium, the "walking leaf," as some have called it. The Master had a hearty laugh at my expense. The Scarabee did not seem to be amused at the Master's remarks or at my blunder. Science is always perfectly serious to him; and he would no more laugh over anything connected with his study, than a clergyman would laugh at a funeral.
That is the question; for insect it is, phyllum siccifolium, the "walking leaf," as some have called it. The Master had a hearty laugh at my expense. The Scarabee did not seem to be amused at the Master's remarks or at my blunder. Science is always perfectly serious to him; and he would no more laugh over anything connected with his study, than a clergyman would laugh at a funeral.
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