bones; at last it is right, hanging by the usual
ring, safe on its gibbet-like frame, dry brown
and ghastly as ever.

Now, the Professor settles down at last
seriously to work. He carefully culls the best
pen in his quiver and nibs it. He takes off the
gutta-percha band that encircles his roll of
lecture manuscripts, and he unscrews the top of his
inkstand. Ye gods of medicine! be propitious,
for the Professor has mounted the tripod—I
mean, he has just seated himself with a plop
on his red morocco-leather-covered library-chair.
Now, he flattens the paper oratorically with the
back of his hand, and with a slightly pompous
hem! savouring somewhat of the British
Institution, and with a slight hiccup, begins to read
his preliminary résumé of the net results of
stomachic digestion:

"First, The food is churned, ground,
triturated, mascerated, disintegrated, and
liquefied."

Here the Professor stopped, and seriously
reflected whether those three last oyster patties
that followed instead of preceding the liberal
helping of Mrs. Fitz-Jones's blanc-mange, were
not rather injudicious.

"2. The fats, liberated from their cellular
envelope, have become oils."

"I shall suffer for this to-morrow," thought
the gay Professor.

"3. The sugars have not much altered, for
they are crystalline bodies; but the cane-sugars
have turned to grape-sugars, and perhaps a
small proportion of them have turned to lactic,
or milk acid."

"I shall have a headache to-morrow," said
the Professor's stomachic conscience, quite
indifferent to the lecture on the gastric
juice.

"4. The vegetable matters have been divided
and made pulpy. The starch of some of them
has turned into saliva."

Here the Professor lighted a cheroot.

"5. The albuminous matters have been
macerated and some portion of them turned into
peptones (how the gas flickers!); the whole has
become a pulp."

"Excellent," said the good little man, rubbing
his plump little hands—"excellently condensed,
though I say it. Such should popular science
be, and would that such it were! I shall then
perform my extraordinary and expensive
experiments of artificial digestion. Taking a—
Halloa! what's that noise? I'm rather nervous
to-night—taking, I say, the stomach of a
newly killed sheep, carefully cleaned and
scented, I shall desire my attendant to place
into it, bit by bit, an excellent dinner: turtle
soup, salmon, salad, a slice of venison,
vegetables, beer, wine, catchup, bread, pastry, and
finally cheese. I shall then pour in two
table-spoonfuls of my artificial gastric juice, and
submit the whole to a gentle heat, showing by an
electric light which will penetrate the tissues of
the bag, the rapid solvency of the whole into one
colourless pulp or chyle. This lecture will lead
to tremendous discussions in the papers. One
will talk cleverly about it, quote the Latin Grammar,
and say some sharp ill-tempered things.
Another, say The Fleam, that clever medical
paper, will have discussions showing that there
is no such thing as gastric juice, and never was:
upon which the Cricket will reply and show that
every drop of blood in our bodies is gastric
juice. When the whole affair is finished, the
Bottler will have some album verses on the
gastric juice, and will have a leader proving that a
belief in the indiscoverability of the component
parts of the gastric juice is a Tory institution.
Ha! ha!"

And here the Professor, pausing to take
breath, actually rolled about in his chair at the
images his exhilarated imagination had raised,
but he suddenly drew up quite rigid and
composed as the echo of his own laugh seemed
to return to him from the bookcase behind
the skeleton.

Now, the Professor, though a vain little man,
and a trifle of a humbug, had a certain sense
of humour, and he was not so wise that he
could laugh at himself. I like him for it, and I
think that that merry (perhaps rather
champagny) laugh did him great credit.

The popular lecturer looked at the clock. It
was ten minutes to one.

''Stay till two," he said, "and just read
short notes that have drawn up for m' Christmas
lecture on 'British and Foreign Wines,
their uses and abuses, with special remarks,
by request, on South African Port and Betts's
Brandy.' Oh that Mrs. Fitz-Jones's
champagne! there was something in it. What two
glasses of cham—" Here the Professor again
hiccuped. "But the cold air on February night
(after supper-parties) does make one hiccup.
What is that noise?

"Let us first consider the bouquet of wines
and its causes (that'll do for them). The bouquet
or vinous perfume arises from the presence and
evolvement of a substance called ænanthic
ether. (Here I must puzzle them a little; the
public like to be puzzled.) Alcohol, you know,
ladies and gentlemen, is a hydrate of the
oxide of ethyle (HO + O + C4 —H5). Now, if we
put—"

I am not prepared to say how unintelligible
the learned Professor might have become had
not a certain strange shuffling stir that he
heard, or fancied he heard, at this moment
struck his attention. It was a sound like the
walking of a very lame man, mixed up with
the stir and drag of a moving chain and a sort
of bony rattle, not at all pleasant at one o'clock
in the morning.

The sound came from the direction of the
bookcase beyond the stove, the little door of
which, by-the-by, at this moment suddenly flew
open with a jerk, as if frightened. The
Professor could not see very well into the dark
corner, for the bright globe of the gas-lamp
shaded it from his eyes. When, however, he
turned his head slightly on one side, and thus
got rid of what (without a bull) might be perhaps
called the overshadowing glare, he caught