"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. the kitchen stairs, and peered in- deduce certain facts not useless to quisitively and suspiciously into the humanity-humanity, I mean, with empty darkness. But good soul ! a big H-HUMANITY. 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 bolts were all up at the shutters, and the doormats 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 horseshoes 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 selfconsciousness, and the memory of that lobster salad, digested so facilely, 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 legbones; 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! savoring somewhat of the British institution, and with a slight hiccough, begins to read his preliminary résumé of the net results of stomachic digestion. "First. The food is churned, ground, triturated, macerated, disintegrated, and liquefied." Here the Professor stopped, and seriously reflected whether those three last oyster patés that followed instead of preceding the liberal helping of Mrs. Fitz-Jones's blancmange were not rather injudicious. "2. The fats, liberated from their cellular envelopes, 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." 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.' 66 '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, catsup, bread, pastry, and finally cheese. I shall then pour in two tablespoonfuls 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 colorless 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 humor, and he was not so wise that he could not 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 Mrs. Fitz-Jones's champagne ! there was something in it. What two glasses of cham-" Here the Professor again hiccoughed. "But the cold air on a February night (after supper parties) does make one hiccough. What is that noise ?" 66 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 œnanthic 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 ethyl (HO+O+C, -H). 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, bythe-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 sight of an extraordinary object-visible, materially visible, to his optic nerves, and to the eyes, which may be called their windows. There was no doubt about it at allhe saw, or thought he saw, distinctly, TWO SKELETONS, sitting and warming their shins in front of his stove door. One must be his laboratory skeleton, for it had the well-known black bullet-mark on the left temple; but the other was a perfect stranger. The one sat with legs stretched foppishly out, and his long right arm hung over the chair-back; the other cowered over the fire and rubbed his knees, which the fire reflection turned to luminous crimson. But the Doctor was a brave man, and not a superstitious one. He had done his best, too, to expose the folly of table-rapping, and of the stuffed hands and lazy tongs, and all the rest of it. He did not, therefore, believe what he saw, but attributed it at once to a natural cause. All he said was, as he rose and pointed at the skeletons, these simple words of common sense: 66 Diseased state of my retina." Here the Polish ghost rose, and introduced his friend with a wave of the hand as "the Guy's Hospital skeleton." Now, I may as well here premise that I am not myself answerable for the exact truth of what the skeleton said, as the Doctor could never make up his mind afterwards whether the skeletons actually spoke, or whether the replies apparently addressed to him by those strange apparitions were not rather replies made by his inner consciousness to his own questions. "Binocular deception, occasioned by temporary vinous affection of the optic nerve, very common after dinner." At this moment the Polish ghost coughed in the impatient way in which people do who wish to edge a word in. The Professor continued in a contemptuous tone, feeling his pulse deliberately as he spoke, and making a note on his blotting-pad of its condition "at fifteen minutes past one, Thursday, February 15th. "The blood heated; the nervous system by some subtle cause thrown off its balance, brain locally excited in the organ of caution—it's all that infernal champagne of Mrs. FitzJones's-that's it-a species of waking nightmare.” 66 'Sorry for it; for she was no great things. I've seen too many ghosts, sir, as some great person once said, ever to believe in them—a pack of rubbish. The man who believes in a ghost, I tell you, ought to be sent to an hospital.” The quiet, dittoing ghost suggested "Guy's," and smiled. "I know the ghost in the tamboured waistcoat, and the skeleton that looked between the bed-curtains and frightened the doctor," "I often meet him," said the said the Professor. ghost. "About the year 1791," said the Professor, treading down all interruptions, "Nicholai began to be visited by crowds of ghosts.' "I was one of them," said the Polish ghost. The skeleton from Guy's nodded, and bleared through a quite superfluous eyeglass, to indicate that he was another. "Crowds of phantasmata," continued Gaster, "who moved and acted before him, who addressed him, and to whom without fear he spoke, knowing that they were symptoms of a certain derangement of health, such as suicidal feelings, and indeed all melancholy, arise from." "Ladies and gentlemen," said the ghost, entreating silence, and actually winking slyly at the Professor. "Daren't look behind you, though!" said the Polish ghost in a nagging and malicious way. At this sneer the ghost from Guy's rubbed his knees harder than ever, and laughed till he rocked again. "Daren't I," said the Doctor, and turned quietly round; then, snapping back again, and catching the gentleman from Poland sliding forward to try and pull his coat and frighten him, he deliberately snatched up his heavy ruler, and hit the Pole a rattling blow on his bare skull; at which the Pole grew angry, and the friend from Guy's laughed more than ever. "How about Maupertuis' ghost? That's a settler, I think," said the Pole, stepping back to a safe distance from the table, and thrusting in the remark spitefully. "The mere fancy of a possible event. Remember the ghost that the captain sat down upon in the arm-chair, and then followed into bed-eh! Halloa! What, not a word to fling to a dog-what, quite "But, my dear sir, a moment's patience; let me put one argument before you. Look at the haunted houses in Great Britain, the rooms where no one can be induced, by even the boundless wealth of the antipodes,' to sleep; look at the clashing of our chains, the white shrouds, the groans, the—" As the Polish skeleton here got out of breath, his lungs being evidently out of order, the Professor slipped in and continued his honest tirade. "Stuff about your haunted houses -noises, all rats and draughts-unnatural deaths, bad sewers-the chains, rusty weathercocks-and all the rest, the tricks of deceiving servants, smugglers, or thieves." Here the ghost from Poland shrugged his shoulders and looked piteously at the ghost from Guy's; then both shrugged their shoulders noisily. "But the wet ensign who comes and tells his sister he is drowned at Cutchemabobbery, in the Madras Presidency!" "Ah! what about the wet ensign?" said the ghost from Guy's, backing up his friend's query in a posing and rather hurt sort of way. "Curse the wet ensign! A frivolous sister, nervous with incessant late hours, too much eau de Cologne, and the perusal of a sensation novel, has apprehensions about her brother in India, eventually goes to sleep over the piano, and dreams she sees him dripping." "But I attended her great aunt, and I ought to know," said the Professor. The skeleton from Guy's here clenched his fist, but the ghost from Poland groaned. "It's no use," said the latter. "On my word of honor, my dear sir," said the ghost from Poland, trying once more, and laying his hand on the vacuity where his heart ought to have been, "it was not a dream." "It was not a dream, on my conscience," said Guy's. "Now look you here, gentlemen,' said the Doctor, getting red in the face, and seriously angry, "I have borne this, I think, long enough. I have proved to you both that you don't exist; why don't you go civilly like gentlemen?" (The Doctor rather slurred the pronunciation of this word.) "You are impostors, scarecrows, mere bubbles; air, vapor, thought. Begone; or, I give you fair notice, if you are not off in five minutes by that clock, I will ring the bell, fire off a double-barrel gun, spring a rattle, throw open the front door, and alarm the street !" This threat seemed to have a great effect on the two skeletons. Guy's sat down and warmed his shinbones again in a desponding manner, but on Poland touching his shoulder, they both got up and began to whisper together in a violent and agitated way. They were evidently going. * * * * * The Doctor fell suddenly into a deep sleep. He did not awake until Betsy Jane, the housemaid, came in |