runk, Muff--you don't mean to call that a
lark!"

"It's a beautiful patriarchal old hen," returns Mr. Muff, "that I bottled
as she was meandering down the mews; and now I vote we have her for lunch.
Who's game to kill her?"

Various plans are immediately suggested, including cutting her head off,
poisoning her with morphia, or shooting her with a little cannon Mr Rapp
has got in his locker; but at last the majority decide upon hanging her. A
gibbet is speedily prepared, simply consisting of a thigh-bone laid across
two high stools; a piece of whip cord is then noosed round the victim's
neck; and she is launched into eternity, as the newspapers say--Mr. Manhug
attending to pull her legs.

"Depend upon it that's a humane death," remarks Mr. Jones. "I never tried
to strangle a fowl but once, and then I twisted its neck bang off. I know
a capital plan to finish cats though."

"Throw it off--put it up--let's have it," exclaim the circle.

"Well, then; you must get their necks in a slip knot and pull them up to a
key-hole. They can't hurt you, you know, because you are the other side
the door.

"Oh, capital--quite a wrinkle," observes Mr. Muff. "But how do you catch
them first?"

"Put a hamper outside the leads with some valerian in it, and a bit of
cord tied to the lid. If you keep watch, you may bag half-a-dozen in no
time; and strange cats are fair game for everybody,--only some of them are
rum 'uns to bite."

At this moment, a new Scotch pupil, who is lulling himself into the belief
that he is studying anatomy from some sheep's eyes by himself in the
Museum, enters the dissecting-room, and mildly asks the porter "what a
heart is worth?"

"I don't know, sir," shouts Mr. Rapp; "it depends entirely upon what's
trumps;" whereupon the new Scotch pupil retires to his study as if he was
shot, followed by several pieces of cinders and tobacco-pipe,

During the preceding conversation, Mr. Muff cuts down the victim with a
scalpel; and, finding that life has departed, commences to pluck it, and
perform the usual post-mortem abdominal examinations attendant upon such
occasions. Mr. Rapp undertakes to manufacture an extempore spit, from the
rather dilapidated umbrella of the new Scotch pupil, which he has
heedlessly left in the dissecting-room. This being completed, with the
assistance of some wire from the ribs of an old skeleton that had hung in
a corner of the room ever since it was built, the hen is put down to
roast,