le glass lodge in the museum
doorway. He _may_ have been asleep. But we feared to touch him--and
indeed slipped very stealthily by him--lest he should suddenly crumble
into dust.

And so to the Museum and its wonders. This Parkes Museum is a kind of
armoury of hygiene, a place full of apparatus for being healthy--in
brief, a museum of sanitary science. To that large and growing class of
people who take no thought of anything but what they eat and what they
drink, and wherewithal they should be clothed, it should prove intensely
interesting. Apart from the difficulty of approach we cannot understand
how it is so neglected by an intelligent public. You can see germicides
and a model convict prison, Pentonville cells in miniature, statistical
diagrams and drain pipes--if only there was a little more about
heredity, it would be exactly the kind of thing that is popular in
literature now, as literature goes. And yet excepting ourselves and the
sleeping porter--if he was sleeping--and the indistinct and motionless
outline, visible through a glass door, of a human body sitting over a
book, there was not a suggestion or memory of living humanity about the
place.

The exhibits of food are especially remarkable. We cleaned the glass
case with our sleeves and peered at the most appetising revelations.
There are dozens of little bottles hermetically sealed, containing such
curios as a sample of "Bacon Common (Gammon) Uncooked," and then the
same cooked--it looked no nicer cooked--Irish sausage, pork sausage,
black pudding, Welsh mutton, and all kinds of rare and exquisite
feeding. There are ever so many cases of this kind of thing. We saw, for
instance, further along, several good specimens of the common oyster
shell (_Ostrea edulis_), cockle shells, and whelks, both "almonds" and
"whites," and then came breadstuffs. The breadstuffs are particularly
impressive, of a grey, scientific aspect, a hard, hoary antiquity. We
always knew that stale bread was good for one, but yet the Parkes Museum
startled us with the antique pattern it recommended. There was a muffin,
too, identified and labelled, but without any Latin name, a captured
crumpet, a collection of buns, a dinner-roll, and a something novel to
us, called Pumpernickel, that we had rather be without, or rather--for
the expression is ambiguous--that we had rather not be without, but
altogether remote from. And all these things have been tested by an
analyst, with the most painf