"I admit that I do not know it all," returned the Idiot. "I prefer to go
through life feeling that there is yet something for me to learn. It
seems to me far better to admit this voluntarily than to have it forced
home upon me by circumstances, as happened in the case of a college
graduate I know, who speculated on Wall Street, and lost the hundred
dollars that were subsequently put to a good use by the uneducated me."

"From which you deduce that ignorance is better than education?" queried
the School-master, scornfully.

"For an omniscient," returned the Idiot, "you are singularly
near-sighted. I have made no such deduction. I arrive at the conclusion,
however, that in the chase for the gilded shekel the education of
experience is better than the coddling of Alma Mater. In the
satisfaction--the personal satisfaction--one derives from a liberal
education, I admit that the sons of Alma Mater are the better off. I
never could hope to be so self-satisfied, for instance, as you are."

[Illustration: THE SCHOOL-MASTER AS A COOLER]

"No," observed the School-master, "you cannot raise grapes on a thistle
farm. Any unbiassed observer looking around this table," he added, "and
noting Mr. Whitechoker, a graduate of Yale; the Bibliomaniac, a son of
dear old Harvard; the Doctor, an honor man of Williams; our legal friend
here, a graduate of Columbia--to say nothing of myself, who was
graduated with honors at Amherst--any unbiassed observer seeing these, I
say, and then seeing you, wouldn't take very long to make up his mind as
to whether a man is better off or not for having had a collegiate
training."