at part of his time.

Two large tables, three chairs and a divan completed the list of all
that could be called furniture. The tables were massive, dark, and
old-fashioned; the feet at each end consisted of thick flat boards sawn
into a design of simple curves, and connected by strong crosspieces
keyed to them with large wooden bolts. The chairs were ancient folding
stools, with movable backs and well-worn cushions of faded velvet.
The divan differed in no respect from ordinary oriental divans in
appearance, and was covered with a stout dark Bokhara carpet of no great
value; but so far as its use was concerned, the disorderly heaps of
books and papers that lay upon it showed that Keyork was more inclined
to make a book-case of it than a couch.

The room received its distinctive character however neither from its
vaulted roof, nor from the deep embrasures of its windows, nor from
its scanty furniture, but from the peculiar nature of the many curious
objects, large and small, which hid the walls and filled almost all
the available space on the floor. It was clear that every one of the
specimens illustrated some point in the great question of life and death
which formed the chief study of Keyork Arabian's latter years; for by
far the greater number of the preparations were dead bodies, of men,
of women, of children, of animals, to all of which the old man had
endeavoured to impart the appearance of life, and in treating some of
which he had attained results of a startling nature. The osteology of
man and beast was indeed represented, for a huge case, covering one
whole wall, was filled to the top with a collection of many hundred
skulls of all races of mankind, and where real specimens were missing,
their place was supplied by admirable casts of craniums; but this
reredos, so to call it, of bony heads, formed but a vast, grinning
background for the bodies which stood and sat and lay in half-raised
coffins and sarcophagi before them, in every condition produced by
various known and lost methods of embalming. There were, it is true,
a number of skeletons, disposed here and there in fantastic attitudes,
gleaming white and ghostly in their mechanical nakedness, the bones of
human beings, the bones of giant orang-outangs, of creatures large and
small down to the flimsy little framework of a common bull frog, strung
on wires as fine as hairs, which squatted comfortably upon an old book
near the edge of a table, as though it had