like human specimens pickled in some light-coloured
fluid resembling spirits of wine. Between these gigantic but more than
horrible receptacles were numberless smaller ones, holding other and
even more dreadful remains; while on pedestals and stands, bolt upright
and reclining, were skeletons of men, monkeys, and quite a hundred sorts
of animals. The intervening spaces were filled with skulls, bones, and
the apparatus for every kind of murder known to the fertile brain of
man. There were European rifles, revolvers, bayonets, and swords;
Italian stilettos, Turkish scimitars, Greek knives, Central African
spears and poisoned arrows, Zulu knobkerries, Afghan yataghans, Malay
krises, Sumatra blow-pipes, Chinese dirks, New Guinea head-catching
implements, Australian spears and boomerangs, Polynesian stone hatchets,
and numerous other weapons the names of which I cannot now remember.
Mixed up with them were implements for every sort of wizardry known to
the superstitious; from old-fashioned English love charms to African Obi
sticks, from spiritualistic planchettes to the most horrible of Fijian
death potions.

In the centre of the wall, opposite to where we stood, was a large
fireplace of the fashion usually met with in old English manor-houses,
and on either side of it a figure that nearly turned me sick with
horror. That on the right hand was apparently a native of Northern
India, if one might judge by his dress and complexion. He sat on the
floor in a constrained attitude, accounted for by the fact that his
head, which was at least three times too big for his body, was so heavy
as to require an iron tripod with a ring or collar in the top of it to
keep it from overbalancing him and bringing him to the floor. To add to
the horror of this awful head, it was quite bald; the skin was drawn
tensely over the bones, and upon this veins stood out as large as
macaroni stems.

On the other side of the hearth was a creature half-ape and
half-man--the like of which I remember once to have seen in a museum of
monstrosities in Sydney, where, if my memory serves me, he was described
upon the catalogue as a Burmese monkey-boy. He was chained to the wall
in somewhat the same fashion as we had been, and was chattering and
scratching for all the world like a monkey in a Zoo.

But, horrible as these things were, the greatest surprise of all was yet
to come. For, standing at the heavy oaken table in the centre of the
room, was a man I shoul