What Is Man? and Other Essays eBook

To be strictly fair, I will concede that now and then one of them will answer your letter, but when they do they avoid the issue—­you cannot pin them down.  When I discovered that the bee was human I wrote about it to all those scientists whom I have just mentioned.  For evasions, I have seen nothing to equal the answers I got.

After the queen, the personage next in importance in the hive is the virgin.  The virgins are fifty thousand or one hundred thousand in number, and they are the workers, the laborers.  No work is done, in the hive or out of it, save by them.  The males do not work, the queen does no work, unless laying eggs is work, but it does not seem so to me.  There are only two million of them, anyway, and all of five months to finish the contract in.  The distribution of work in a hive is as cleverly and elaborately specialized as it is in a vast American machine-shop or factory.  A bee that has been trained to one of the many and various industries of the concern doesn’t know how to exercise any other, and would be offended if asked to take a hand in anything outside of her profession.  She is as human as a cook; and if you should ask the cook to wait on the table, you know what will happen.  Cooks will play the piano if you like, but they draw the line there.  In my time I have asked a cook to chop wood, and I know about these things.  Even the hired girl has her frontiers; true, they are vague, they are ill-defined, even flexible, but they are there.  This is not conjecture; it is founded on the absolute.  And then the butler.  You ask the butler to wash the dog.  It is just as I say; there is much to be learned in these ways, without going to books.  Books are very well, but books do not cover the whole domain of esthetic human culture.  Pride of profession is one of the boniest bones in existence, if not the boniest.  Without doubt it is so in the hive.

TAMING THE BICYCLE

In the early eighties Mark Twain learned to ride one of the old high-wheel bicycles of that period.  He wrote an account of his experience, but did not offer it for publication.  The form of bicycle he rode long ago became antiquated, but in the humor of his pleasantry is a quality which does not grow old.

A. B. P.

I

I thought the matter over, and concluded I could do it.  So I went down a bought a barrel of Pond’s Extract and a bicycle.  The Expert came home with me to instruct me.  We chose the back yard, for the sake of privacy, and went to work.

Mine was not a full-grown bicycle, but only a colt—­a fifty-inch, with the pedals shortened up to forty-eight—­and skittish, like any other colt.  The Expert explained the thing’s points briefly, then he got on its back and rode around a little, to show me how easy it was to do.  He said that the dismounting was perhaps the hardest thing to learn, and so we would leave that to the last.  But he was in error there.  He found, to his surprise and joy, that all that he needed to do was to get me on to the machine and stand out of the way; I could get off, myself.  Although I was wholly inexperienced, I dismounted in the best time on record.  He was on that side, shoving up the machine; we all came down with a crash, he at the bottom, I next, and the machine on top.