“Halloo, Muff! how are you, my bean—­what’s up?” is the general exclamation.

“Oh, here’s a lark!” is all Mr. Muff’s reply.

“Lark!” cries Mr. Rapp; “you’re drunk, 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, presenting the most extraordinary specimen of trussing upon record.  Mr. Jones undertakes to buy some butter at a shop behind the hospital; and Mr. Manhug, not being able to procure any flour, gets some starch from the cabinet of the lecturer on Materia Medica, and powders it in a mortar which he borrows from the laboratory.