The Parson mused, and was silent.
“Sir,” said Kenelm, “your reticence
proves your honesty, and I respect it.”
So saying, he bounded off, and left the Parson crying
out wildly, “But—but—”
MR. SAUNDERSON and Kenelm sat in the arbour:
the former sipping his grog and smoking his pipe;
the latter looking forth into the summer night skies
with an earnest yet abstracted gaze, as if he were
trying to count the stars in the Milky Way.
“Ha!” said Mr. Saunderson, who was concluding
an argument; “you see it now, don’t you?”
“I? not a bit of it. You tell me that your
grandfather was a farmer, and your father was a farmer,
and that you have been a farmer for thirty years;
and from these premises you deduce the illogical and
irrational conclusion that therefore your son must
be a farmer.”
“Young man, you may think yourself very knowing
’cause you have been at the ’Varsity,
and swept away a headful of book-learning.”
“Stop,” quoth Kenelm. “You
grant that a university is learned.”
“Well, I suppose so.”
“But how could it be learned if those who quitted
it brought the learning away? We leave it all
behind us in the care of the tutors. But I know
what you were going to say,—that it is not
because I had read more books than you have that I
was to give myself airs and pretend to have more knowledge
of life than a man of your years and experience.
Agreed, as a general rule. But does not every
doctor, however wise and skilful, prefer taking another
doctor’s opinion about himself, even though
that other doctor has just started in practice?
And seeing that doctors, taking them as a body, are
monstrous clever fellows, is not the example they
set us worth following? Does it not prove that
no man, however wise, is a good judge of his own case?
Now, your son’s case is really your case:
you see it through the medium of your likings and
dislikings; and insist upon forcing a square peg into
a round hole, because in a round hole you, being a
round peg, feel tight and comfortable. Now I call
that irrational.”
“I don’t see why my son has any right
to fancy himself a square peg,” said the farmer,
doggedly, “when his father and his grandfather
and his great-grandfather have been round pegs; and
it is agin’ nature for any creature not to take
after its own kind. A dog is a pointer or a sheep-dog
according as its forebears were pointers or sheep-dogs.
There,” cried the farmer, triumphantly, shaking
the ashes out of his pipe. “I think I have
posed you, young master!”
“No; for you have taken it for granted that
the breeds have not been crossed. But suppose
that a sheep-dog has married a pointer, are you sure
that his son will not be more of a pointer than a sheep-dog?”
Mr. Saunderson arrested himself in the task of refilling
his pipe, and scratched his head.
