“Licence be hanged! Do you think we care for the fanatics who impede our work? Let them show themselves at St. Bernard’s! Crowe has one, because it looks well to the public; but don’t you preach, Wilks, or you’ll do for yourself. Go on.” “Now when I was at work on the physiology part of the business, I never thought of the cruelty, but now it all came upon me horribly. My position was bad enough, but these poor dogs—animals, like ourselves—they were in cruel agony without food or water. I was only not on a feather bed, that was all; they were dying in awful torment. I thought my imprisonment was all arranged by a higher Power, to let me know what I was doing; and God knows I suffered shame and mental distress that night. I fell asleep at last, though the moans and the clockwork worked themselves into my dreams. All at once a loud noise aroused me. I started up, and to my unutterable horror, saw the arm of the corpse on the coffin lid slowly rising, and pointing its rigid hand at me in the dim light. I am no coward, as you know; but my heart was in my mouth as I stared with starting eyeballs at the ghastly object, and then I saw what had happened. The counterpoise of the pulley had slipped down, and dragged up the right arm of the corpse. It was the falling of the weight on the floor of the vault that awoke me. Just then the clock struck three, and I left the arm pointing its stiff fingers at me and went to sleep again—‘to sleep, to dream.’ I dreamt that two awful-looking burkers had brought a subject in, had taken their gold from the place where it lay ready for them, and had caught sight of me. ‘Why, Bill,’ said one, ‘here’s a chance; let us smother this bloke, and he’ll be worth another five-pun-note to us!’ ‘Right you are, Tom!’ said the other. And they proceeded to carry out their diabolical plans, when I awoke. Horrible night-mare! I shudder now when I think of it.” “Rather creepy, I must say,” said little Murphy. “Well, I could not sleep any more after that, and lay a-meditating. After all, I thought, why shouldn’t I have been murdered and given up to science, as I had done with those wretched dogs in the next room? Did not the same Power frame their bodies as mine? Were not the processes Nature so lovingly and carefully carried on in their sensitive little frames just as beautiful and well adapted as those which went on in me? I repented, my lads, that night, and I have never spoken to Crowe since, and have done with that sort of work.” “Ah! you are a sentimentalist,” they cried; “but tell us how you got out.”