"Oh, hold your gab," said the ruffian. "As for selling fellow-critters, why, that was once a reggelar business of mine; for, d'ye see, I was a body-snatcher. And I reckon I was more skeared once snapping up a dead body, than ever I shall be lifting a live one. You must know, I was snatching for the doctors, over there in Jarsey; for, d'ye see, I'm a Jarseyman myself: I reckon it was some fourteen months ago: it was summer. What the devil-be-cursed the doctor wanted with a body in summer, I don't know; but it was none on my business. So we, went, me and Tim Stokes, and the doctor, to an old burying-ground where they had just earthed a youngster that the doctor said would suit him. Well, d'ye see, when we came to the grave, up jumps a blasted devil, as big as a cow, or it might ha' been a ghost, and set up a cry. So we takes to our heels. But the doctor said 'twas a man's cry, and no ghost's. And so, d'ye see, blast it, we was for going back again, after having a confab; when what should we do but find a poor devil of a feller lying dead by a hole under a beech-tree. The doctor said _he_ would do better nor the other; and so, blast it, d'ye see, we nabbed him." "Of a surety," said I, eagerly, "it was the beech-tree at the Owl-roost! and that was the body of poor Sheppard Lee!" "Well, they did call him summat of that like; and they made a great fuss about him in the papers. But I'm hanged if I wasn't skeared after that out of all body-snatching." "Friend," said I, "can thee tell me what the doctor did with that body?" "Why, cut him up, blast him, and made a raw-head-and-bloody-bones of him. The doctor was so cussed partickilar, he wouldn't let us even knock the teeth out; though that was no great loss, for Jarseymen hasn't no great shakes in the tooth way." Alas! what an ending for poor Sheppard Lee! His body subjected to the knife of an anatomist, his bones scraped, boiled, bleached, hung together on wires, and set up in a museum, while his spirit was wandering about from body to body, enduring more afflictions in each than it had ever mourned even in that unlucky original dwelling it was so glad to leave! I am not of a sentimental turn, and I cannot say that, as Zachariah Longstraw, I felt any peculiar sorrow for the woes of Sheppard Lee. Nevertheless, I did not hear this account of the brutal way in which his body had been stolen and anatomized, without some touch of indignation and grief; which, perhaps, I should have expressed, had not there arisen, before the brutal Samuel had quite finished his remarks on Jerseymen's teeth, an occasion to exercise those feelings on my own immediate behalf.