"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?"