The things that came out of that cavern behind the _cassettone_!--you never would have thought it! A large can of genuine Amber Varnish that had had its cork left out, and wouldn't pour; the Skeleton's missing right scapula, only it wouldn't hold now; and, besides, one never wanted the Skeleton; a great lump of modelling-wax and apparently infinite tools--no use to Mr. Aiken now, because he never did any modelling, but they might be a godsend to some art-student; folio volumes of anatomical steel-plates, that the engravers had hoped would last for ever--a hope the mice may have shared, but they had done pretty well already; Mr. Aiken's old ivory foot-rule, which was the only accurate one in the British Empire, and what the dooce had become of it he never could tell; plaster heads without noses, and fingers without hands, and discarded fig-foliage, like a pawnshop in Eden; things, too, for which no assignable purpose appeared on the closest examination--things that must have been the lifework of insane artisans, skilful and thorough outside the powers of language to express, but stark mad beyond a doubt. And a Dutch clock that must have been saying it was a quarter-past twelve, unrebuked, for four years or so past. Mr. Aiken need not have tried to pour out the Amber Varnish; where was the sense of standing waiting, hoping against hope for liquidation? He need not have hunted up a pair of pliers to raise vain hopes in the scapula's breast--or its equivalent--of a new lease of life. He need not have tried to soften the heart of that wax. Nor have turned over the plates to see if any were left perfect. Nor need he have reconsidered the Inexplicables, to find some plausible _raison d'être_ for them, nor tried to wind up the Dutch clock with sporadic keys, found among marine stores in a nail-box. But he was excusable for sitting and gloating over his ivory foot-rule, his sole prize from a wrestling-match with intolerable filth--or only tolerable by a Londoner. He was weary, and the daylight had vanished. And even if he had got a squeeze out of that tube, he couldn't have used it. It was much too ticklish a job to do in the dark. He sat and brooded over his loneliness in the twilight. How in Heaven's name had this odious quarrel come about? Nonsense about Sairah! That absurd business _began_ it, of course. Serious quarrels grow out of the most contemptible nonsense, sometimes. Oh no--there was something behind; some underlying cause. But he sought in vain to imagine one. They had always been such capital friends, he and Euphemia! It was true they wrangled a great deal, often enough. But come, I say! If a man wasn't to be at liberty to wrangle with his own wife, what _were_ we coming to?