"Well, Miss, I began to feel very uneasy directly they was gone. I thought they looked back so queerly, and old Tom was mewing so dreadful in the basket. Presently I began to hear a mewing out of the cupboard, and a mewing out of the clock, and even out of the dripping-pan. So I put on my bonnet as quick as I could, and ran right away to the College, and somehow or other by the time I got there, I was in a fright all over. As good luck would have it, the man was at the gate; a nice respectable married man, and a friend of Charley’s. ’Curbs,’ I says, ’where is Professor Sallenders?’ ’Down in the country,’ says he, ’since last Friday. He never stops here at Christmas, Mrs. Shelfer, he’s a deal too knowing for that.’ My heart went pop, Miss, like an oyster shell in the fire. I held on by the door, and I thought it was all up with me. ’Don’t take on so, Missus,’ says Curbs, ’if any of your museum is ill, there’s half a dozen clever young coves in the operating room over there, only they’re busy just now, cutting up a big black cat. My eyes, how he did squeal!’ I screamed out and ran--Curbs thought I was mad, and he was not far out--bang went the door before me, and there on the table, with the lantern-jawed young man flourishing a big knife over him, there lay my precious old Tom strapped down on his back, with his mouth tied up in white tape, and leather gloves over his feet, and sticks trussed across him the same as a roasting rabbit, and a streak of white all along his blessed stomach--you know, Miss, he hadn’t got one white hair by rights--where the niggers had shaved and floured him, to see what they were about. He turned up his dear old eyes when he saw me; it would have made you cry, and he tried to speak. Oh you precious old soul, didn’t I scatter them right and left? I scratched that lantern-jawed hypocrite’s face till I gave him the hirumbillycuss and hirumtommycuss too, I expect. I called a policeman in, and there wasn’t one of them finished his Christmas in London. But the poor old soul has never been the same cat since. The anxiety he was in, turned his hair white on both sides of his heart and all round the backs of his ears. He wouldn’t come to the door, he shook so, at the call of the cat’s-meat man for better than a month, and he won’t look at it now, while there’s a skewer in it." The poor little woman was crying with pity and rage. Old Tom looked up all the time as if he knew all she said, and then jumped on her lap, and showed his paws, and purred.