with ugly girls, chat with talkative old fogies,
and take gorgeous dowagers down to the
supper-room. And as the Professor did not care
about being joked at, but, on the contrary liked
it, and, when joked, laughed, and twinkled, and
beamed through his silvery spectacles, like a
merry old glow-worm, every one forgot his
learning and celebrity and liked the Professor
heartily.

On the night in question, the Professor was
in high spirits—and with some reason. Firstly,
he had made two jokes that had set the supper-
table in a roar, and had made the jellies shake as if
they felt the cold. Secondly, he had waltzed twice
with pretty Fanny Ledger, and had received a
smile that gave hopes of more intimate relationship
being established some day between the
houses of Ledger and Gaster. Thirdly, a great
thought had struck him, as he walked briskly and
chirpily home, for his celebrated Treatise on the
Merrythought of the Dodo, which was to be
read at the Royal Society on the ensuing
Wednesday.

I do not wish to say that the Professor had
taken champagne with more people that night
than he ought, at Mrs. Fitz-Jones's great annual
party (though even that would only tend to show
the largeness of the excellent man's benevolence),
but still I must concede that somehow
or other he was abnormally exhilarated, for
he danced a cavalier seul as he put his Gibus
on the hall-table, and pirouetted as he took off
his grey opera wrapper and shawl handkerchief,
and lighted his moderator lamp at the flame of the
expiring Palmer's night-light. But, as I have
often observed that great benevolence and good
animal spirits go together, I am sometimes
inclined to think that the milk of human kindness
is in some constitutions flavoured slightly with
alcohol, and therefore partakes of the nature of
milk-punch. However, I leave this abstruse
question to those clear-headed gentlemen the
physiologists.

The Professor was as brave as most men, but
he was that night, it must be confessed, a little
nervous. His nerves were sensitive and wide
awake—in the state that I should be inclined to
think the London and Epsom telegraph wires
are in, when idle for a moment or two on a
Derby Day—that is, constantly and almost
fretfully expecting a message to be sent through
their medium. The Professor, I think, had got a
sort of vague suspicion of ghosts or thieves—
material or spiritual intruders, he did not know
which, and he did not care which either; for I
am sure that in the one case he would have
fallen on them with the slender dress-cane then
in his hand (not a formidable weapon it must be
allowed), and in the other have flung open the
front door and shouted for the police. It was,
at all events, owing to this slight nervous
derangement, I suppose, that the Professor, as he
lighted his lamp, went down the two steps that
led to the kitchen stairs, and peered inquisitively
and suspiciously into the empty darkness. But,
good soul! there was nothing to see there save
one black-beetle on the wall, and nothing to hear
but the watchful drudging tick of the imprisoned
kitchen clock below. The bells were all
up at the shutters, and the door-mats were duly
removed. Trusty Mrs. Dawson had forgotten
nothing.

"Pooh! what a fool I am!" thought the
Professor, as he turned the key of his laboratory
door, opening out of the hall to the right,
and stepped in. Everything was snug and
trim, the stove was ruddy, the gas-lamps were
just alight, and that was all: their little blue
jets hoarding up the flame with due regard to
the quarterly gas bill. How clear and bright
the spirit lamp looked; how crystalline were the
glass bowls; how ready to go through fire and
water, the rough crucibles; how grand the
retorts; how red the vermilioned horse-shoes of
big magnets! In the exhilaration of those
after-supper moments the Professor felt quite a
boy again, and the old boyish delight at the
sight of the chemical apparatus came over him
with its old power. "Of what use was it to go
to bed? He was sure not to get to sleep after
that strong coffee. Why might he not sit up for
an hour and work?"

"Work." But here a difficulty presented itself.
What kind of work should Professor Gaster
select? There wasn't time to go into "the
dodo's merrythought," and it wanted daylight
to examine "the capillary circulation of the
tadpole's tail." But the Professor had a will of his
own; he decided in a moment; the struggle
was over; he would—yes, that was it—pursue
his researches on "the gastric juice and the
effect of alcoholic liquids upon the human
system." Thoughts suggested at Mrs.
Fitz-Jones's party might possibly be useful; he
might even from his own self-consciousness,
and the memory of that lobster salad, digested
so facilely, deduce certain facts not useless to
humanity—humanity, I mean, with a big H—
HUMANITY.

"What's that noise? Oh, only the policeman
trying the front door to see if it is properly
bolted."

The Professor sits down at his table, which is
on the door-side of the stove, turns up the gas
(up it flies like a willing spirit), and sits down
to work quietly for an hour at his résumé
lecture on the gastric juice. But first he goes
(I should mention) to a side-table at the farthest
end of the room beyond the stove, to see that
that mischievous girl of Mrs. Dawson's, hasn't
been touching the thermo-electrical instruments.
No, the wires are right, and yesterday's solder,
joining the bars of copper and the bars of iron, is
firm and uncracked. But I think she has been
moving the skeleton of the Polish soldier that
the doctor keeps for his anatomical lectures,
else why is one of the skeleton's legs thrust out
before the other, as if our bony friend with
the vacant eyes, and the Russian bullet in his
skull, had been promenading the laboratory in
his master's absence? With a "tut-tut" of
impatience the doctor puts the skeleton into its
right place in the corner, and makes as he does
it quite a castanet clatter with the loose leg