“This perpetual spying on my actions became at last intolerable and I was on the point of sending the two hussies about their business when an accident put an end to the state of affairs.  I had gone out of the front door and let myself in by the side entrance, but, by some amazing inadvertence, had left the lobby door unfastened; and I had barely got on my apron to begin work when I heard someone enter the lobby.  Then came a gentle tapping at the door of the laboratory.  I took no notice, but waited to see what would happen.  The tapping was repeated louder and yet louder, and still I made no move.  Then, after an interval, I heard a wire inserted in the lock.

“I determined to make an end of this.  Quietly concealing the material on which I was working, I took down from a hook a large butterfly-net (my poor wife had been interested in Lepidoptera).  Very softly I tiptoed to the door and suddenly flung it open.  There stood Susan Slodger with a hair-pin in her hand, absolutely paralyzed with terror.  In a moment, before she had time to recover, I had slipped the butterfly-net over her head.

“That revived her.  With a piercing yell she turned and fled, and with such precipitancy that she pulled the net off the handle.  I saw her flying down the lobby with the net over her head, looking like an oriental bride; I heard the street door bang, and I found the butter-fly net on the doormat.  But Susan Slodger I never set eyes on again.

“The cook left me the same day, taking Susan’s box with her.  It was a great relief.  I now had the house to myself and could work without interruption or the discomfort of being spied upon.  As to the products of my labors, they are fully set forth in the catalogue; and of this adventure I can only say to the visitor to my museum in the words of the well-known inscription, ‘Si monumentum requiris, Circumspice?’”

Such was Challoner’s account of his acquisition of the specimens numbered 2, 3 and 4.  The descriptions of the preparations were, as he had said, set out in dry and precise detail in the catalogue, and some of the particulars were really quite interesting, as, for instance, the fact that “the skull of Number 4 combines an extreme degree of dolichocephaly (67.5) with a cranial capacity of no more than 1523 cubic centimeters.”  It was certainly what one might have expected from his conduct.

But to the general reader the question which will suggest itself is, What was the state of Challoner’s mind?  Was he mad?  Was he wicked?  Or had he merely an unconventional point of view?  It is to the latter opinion that I incline after long consideration.  He clearly rejected the criminal as a fellow-creature and regarded himself as a public benefactor in eliminating him.  And perhaps he was right.

As to the apparently insane pleasure that he took in the actual captures, I can only say that sane men take a pleasure in the slaughter of harmless animals—­such as the giraffe—­for which they have no need; and other sane men actually go abroad and kill—­by barbarous methods—­foreign men of estimable character with whom they have no quarrel.  This sport they call war and seem to enjoy it.  But killing is killing; and a foreign peasant’s life is surely worth more than a British criminal’s.