“You did not know that taxidermy rose to heights like that.  My boy, it has risen higher.  I have rivalled the hands of Nature herself.  One of the genuine great auks”—­his voice fell to a whisper—­one of the genuine great auks was made by me.”

“No.  You must study ornithology, and find out which it is yourself.  And what is more, I have been approached by a syndicate of dealers to stock one of the unexplored skerries to the north of Iceland with specimens.  I may—­some day.  But I have another little thing in hand just now.  Ever heard of the dinornis?

“It is one of those big birds recently extinct in New Zealand.  ‘Moa’ is its common name, so called because extinct:  there is no moa now.  See?  Well, they have got bones of it, and from some of the marshes even feathers and dried bits of skin.  Now, I am going to—­well, there is no need to make any bones about it—­going to forge a complete stuffed moa.  I know a chap out there who will pretend to make the find in a kind of antiseptic swamp, and say he stuffed it at once, as it threatened to fall to pieces.  The feathers are peculiar, but I have got a simply lovely way of dodging up singed bits of ostrich plume.  Yes, that is the new smell you noticed.  They can only discover the fraud with a microscope, and they will hardly care to pull a nice specimen to bits for that.

“In this way, you see, I give my little push in the advancement of science.

“But all this is merely imitating Nature.  I have done more than that in my time.  I have—­beaten her.”

He took his feet down from the mantel-board, and leant over confidentially towards me.  “I have created birds,” he said in a low voice. “New birds.  Improvements.  Like no birds that was ever seen before.”

He resumed his attitude during an impressive silence.

“Enrich the universe; rath-er.  Some of the birds I made were new kinds of humming birds, and very beautiful little things, but some of them were simply rum.  The rummest, I think, was the Anomalopteryx Jejuna.  Jejunus-a-um—­empty—­so called because there was really nothing in it; a thoroughly empty bird—­except for stuffing.  Old Javvers has the thing now, and I suppose he is almost as proud of it as I am.  It is a masterpiece, Bellows.  It has all the silly clumsiness of your pelican, all the solemn want of dignity of your parrot, all the gaunt ungainliness of a flamingo, with all the extravagant chromatic conflict of a mandarin duck. Such a bird.  I made it out of the skeletons of a stork and a toucan and a job lot of feathers.  Taxidermy of that kind is just pure joy, Bellows, to a real artist in the art.