"A lot of pikers, by George!" said Billings with an air of indignation. "Must have been shameless!" "Deuced indifferent," I ventured. "I should have been regularly cut up." "Ah! of course you would," cried the professor, lifting another pinch. "There speaks the intelligent devotee of science! But did they see it that way? Not at all, sir; they were only indifferent and ungrateful--they were rude and--ah--boisterous! One savage primate assaulted me with his bare knuckles. A blow, gentlemen, a blow from the boasted family of anthropina!" "Beastly outrage, Professor," growled Billings. "Leave it to me; I know a chap who's got a pull with the police commissioner, and I'll just tip him off, by George. It's no matter what family they are or how much they boasted. It'll be the hurry wagon and the cooler for them, eh, Dicky?" He gestured to me wildly, nodding his head like a man with the what's-it-name dance. "Deuced good idea. Awful rotters, I say," was my comment. The professor seemed affected by our sympathy. He withdrew from his pocket a folded handkerchief, slowly opened it and pressed it lightly to each eye. Then he carefully refolded and replaced it. "Strange thing, the persistence of the primitive emotions," he said, sniffing thoughtfully. "Singular how they affect the lachrymal _apparati_. Peculiarly disagreeable taste, gentlemen, that of tears, despite their simple elementary composition--ninety-nine and six-tenths per cent. water, you remember, and the rest a modicum of chloride of sodium, mucus, soda and phosphates. H'm! Your pardon, gentlemen, for this digression, but to have sustained a stab under this very roof from _genus homo_! It is indeed hard." Here Jenkins, who had been lingering and busying himself about the apartment, whispered to me from behind: "It's that dago, sir, that delivers fruit every day." "Eh?" "That's the name. I see him going back every morning." Jenkins moved off, nodding mysteriously, as I stared at him through my glass. In his way, Billings was speaking words of comfort and all that sort of thing to the professor. "Never mind; the law will get 'em for you," he reassured him. "Ah! that's just where you are in error," sighed our guest. "The law, sir, will not get a single subject for me. In this age of unrestrained liberty of all classes, the law lends no aid whatever to science. It is not as it was in the glorious past when, under imperial patronage, Vesalius, the great father of anatomy, was protected when by mistake his scalpel cut the living heart of a Spanish grandee. Times worth while, gentlemen, those great days of supreme imperialism! Ah! there was no lack of material available if one stood in a little at court; one had only to designate a selection and the thing was done. Gracious, gentle times, my friends! Gone, alas, for ever! Such opportunities are impossible under a republic." The professor shook his head and reached for his handkerchief again. But this time he only blew his nose.