第26章

--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.

--Lives on a bumblebee, does he?--I said.That's the way I call it.

Bumblebee or bumblybee and huckleberry.Humblebee and whortleberry for people that say Woos-ses-ter and Nor-wich.

--The Scarabee did not smile; he took no interest in trivial matters like this.

--Lives on a bumblebee.When you come to think of it, he must lead a pleasant kind of life.Sails through the air without the trouble of flying.Free pass everywhere that the bee goes.No fear of being dislodged; look at those six grappling-hooks.Helps himself to such juices of the bee as he likes best; the bee feeds on the choicest vegetable nectars, and he feeds on the bee.Lives either in the air or in the perfumed pavilion of the fairest and sweetest flowers.

Think what tents the hollyhocks and the great lilies spread for him!

And wherever he travels a band of music goes with him, for this hum which wanders by us is doubtless to him a vast and inspiring strain of melody.--I thought all this, while the Scarabee supposed I was studying the minute characters of the enigmatical specimen.

--I know what I consider your pediculus melittae, I said at length.

Do you think it really the larva of meloe?

--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.----If I live a few years longer it shall be settled, sir; and if my epitaph can say honestly that I settled it, I shall be willing to trust my posthumous fame to that achievement.

I said good morning to the specialist, and went off feeling not only kindly, but respectfully towards him.He is an enthusiast, at any rate, as "earnest" a man as any philanthropic reformer who, having passed his life in worrying people out of their misdoings into good behavior, comes at last to a state in which he is never contented except when he is making somebody uncomfortable.He does certainly know one thing well, very likely better than anybody in the world.

I find myself somewhat singularly placed at our table between a minute philosopher who has concentrated all his faculties on a single subject, and my friend who finds the present universe too restricted for his intelligence.I would not give much to hear what the Scarabee says about the old Master, for he does not pretend to form a judgment of anything but beetles, but I should like to hear what the Master has to say about the Scarabee.I waited after breakfast until he had gone, and then asked the Master what he could make of our dried-up friend.

--Well,--he said,--I am hospitable enough in my feelings to him and all his tribe.These specialists are the coral-insects that build up a reef.By and by it will be an island, and for aught we know may grow into a continent.But I don't want to be a coral-insect myself.

I had rather be a voyager that visits all the reefs and islands the creatures build, and sails over the seas where they have as yet built up nothing.I am a little afraid that science is breeding us down too fast into coral-insects.A man like Newton or Leibnitz or Haller used to paint a picture of outward or inward nature with a free hand, and stand back and look at it as a whole and feel like an archangel;but nowadays you have a Society, and they come together and make a great mosaic, each man bringing his little bit and sticking it in its place, but so taken up with his petty fragment that he never thinks of looking at the picture the little bits make when they are put together.You can't get any talk out of these specialists away from their own subjects, any more than you can get help from a policeman outside of his own beat.

--Yes,--said I,--but why should n't we always set a man talking about the thing he knows best?

--No doubt, no doubt, if you meet him once; but what are you going to do with him if you meet him every day? I travel with a man and we want to make change very often in paying bills.But every time I ask him to change a pistareen, or give me two fo'pencehappennies for a ninepence, or help me to make out two and thrippence (mark the old Master's archaisms about the currency), what does the fellow do but put his hand in his pocket and pull out an old Roman coin; I have no change, says he, but this assarion of Diocletian.Mighty deal of good that'll do me!

--It isn't quite so handy as a few specimens of the modern currency would be, but you can pump him on numismatics.

--To be sure, to be sure.I've pumped a thousand men of all they could teach me, or at least all I could learn from 'em; and if it comes to that, I never saw the man that couldn't teach me something.

I can get along with everybody in his place, though I think the place of some of my friends is over there among the feeble-minded pupils, and I don't believe there's one of them, I couldn't go to school to for half an hour and be the wiser for it.But people you talk with every day have got to have feeders for their minds, as much as the stream that turns a millwheel has.It isn't one little rill that's going to keep the float-boards turning round.Take a dozen of the brightest men you can find in the brightest city, wherever that may be,--perhaps you and I think we know,--and let 'em come together once a month, and you'll find out in the course of a year or two the ones that have feeders from all the hillsides.Your common talkers, that exchange the gossip of the day, have no wheel in particular to turn, and the wash of the rain as it runs down the street is enough for them.