“Well,” I admitted cautiously, “jellyfish of the spine must be an unlovely ailment; not that I ever heard of it before.”

“You’re willing for me to go, then?”

“You’d go anyhow, would you not?”

“Forget it!” said he roughly.  “If you think I’d do anything I knew would cause you uneasiness, you’ve got another thing coming to you.”

“Oh, go, for heaven’s sake!” said I, sharply.

“All right.  I’ll go for heaven’s sake,” he agreed cheerfully.  “And now it’s formally decided I’m to go, and talk, the question arises—­what they really want me to talk about? I don’t know how to deal in glittering generalities.  A chap on the trail of truth has got to let generalities go by the board.  The minute he tackles the living Little People he chucks theories and bucks conditions.

“Suppose I tell the truth as I see it:  that most so-called authorities are like cats chasing their tails—­because they accept theories that have never been really proven, run after them, and so never get anywhere?  And that facts dug up in the open under the sunlight don’t always fit in with notions hatched out in libraries under the electric light?

“Suppose I say that after they’ve run everything down to that plasma they’re so fond of beginning and ending with, there is still something behind it all their theories can’t explain away?  Protoplasm doesn’t explain Life any more than the battery explains electricity.  Instinct?  Evolution?  The survival of the fittest?  Well, nothing is tagged for fair, and I’m more than willing to be shown.  For the more I find out from the living things themselves,—­you can’t get truth from death, you’ve got to get it from life—­the more self-evident it seems to me that to exist at all insects must have arrived on the scene complete, handfinished, with the union label of the Great Workshop on them by way of a trade-mark.”

“As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, one God, world without end, Amen!” said I, smiling.  I have never thought it necessary to explain or excuse the Creator.  God is; things are.

But he shook his head, wrinkling his forehead painfully.  “I wish I knew,” said he, wistfully.  “You’re satisfied to believe, but I have got to know.  Oh, great Power behind Things, I want to know!  I want to know!”

Ah, but I also do most passionately wish to know!  If, however, the Insect has taught me anything in my lifelong study of it, it is to recognize the Unknowable, to know there is that which I cannot hope to know.  But if under the law of its world, so different from ours and yet so alike because so inevitable, the Insect must move in a fixed circle within which it is safe, a circle whose very limitation preserves it from error and thus from destruction, may not a like fixed circle beyond which we may not penetrate preserve us, too?  Are these mountain peaks of the Unknowable, the Impassable, which encompass the skyline of our humanity, these heights so mysterious and so unscalable, not rather bulwarks between man’s pride and the abyss?