popular song of King Death, with chorus by the whole strength of the company,” as the great Harmonic feature of the week and announces in the bill that “J.  G. B. is induced to do so at a considerable extra expense in consequence of a wish which has been very generally expressed at the bar by a large body of respectable individuals and in homage to a late melancholy event which has aroused so much sensation.”  There is one point connected with the deceased upon which the court is particularly anxious, namely, that the fiction of a full-sized coffin should be preserved, though there is so little to put in it.  Upon the undertaker’s stating in the Sol’s bar in the course of the day that he has received orders to construct “a six-footer,” the general solicitude is much relieved, and it is considered that Mr. Smallweed’s conduct does him great honour.

Out of the court, and a long way out of it, there is considerable excitement too, for men of science and philosophy come to look, and carriages set down doctors at the corner who arrive with the same intent, and there is more learned talk about inflammable gases and phosphuretted hydrogen than the court has ever imagined.  Some of these authorities (of course the wisest) hold with indignation that the deceased had no business to die in the alleged manner; and being reminded by other authorities of a certain inquiry into the evidence for such deaths reprinted in the sixth volume of the Philosophical Transactions; and also of a book not quite unknown on English medical jurisprudence; and likewise of the Italian case of the Countess Cornelia Baudi as set forth in detail by one Bianchini, prebendary of Verona, who wrote a scholarly work or so and was occasionally heard of in his time as having gleams of reason in him; and also of the testimony of Messrs. Fodere and Mere, two pestilent Frenchmen who would investigate the subject; and further, of the corroborative testimony of Monsieur Le Cat, a rather celebrated French surgeon once upon a time, who had the unpoliteness to live in a house where such a case occurred and even to write an account of it—­still they regard the late Mr. Krook’s obstinacy in going out of the world by any such by-way as wholly unjustifiable and personally offensive.  The less the court understands of all this, the more the court likes it, and the greater enjoyment it has in the stock in trade of the Sol’s Arms.  Then there comes the artist of a picture newspaper, with a foreground and figures ready drawn for anything from a wreck on the Cornish coast to a review in Hyde Park or a meeting in Manchester, and in Mrs. Perkins’ own room, memorable evermore, he then and there throws in upon the block Mr. Krook’s house, as large as life; in fact, considerably larger, making a very temple of it.  Similarly, being permitted to look in at the door of the fatal chamber, he depicts that apartment as three-quarters of a mile long by fifty yards high, at which the court is particularly charmed.  All this time the two gentlemen before mentioned pop in and out of every house and assist at the philosophical disputations—­go everywhere and listen to everybody—­and yet are always diving into the Sol’s parlour and writing with the ravenous little pens on the tissue-paper.