Professor Thunder had found a vacant shop to suit him near the end of Main-street, Wangaroo.  He would have preferred a central site at the same price, or even less, but none was available.  However, business was so good on the first afternoon and evening that he resolved to extend his Wangaroo season into the following week.  This involved a day of idleness, an unemployed Sunday, a boon that rarely came to the partakers in Professor Thunder’s godless enterprises, the day of rest usually being given over to travel and arduous preparations for a Monday matinee.

Nicholas Crips was well content with the change of dates.  He certainly took a good deal of natural pride in his marked success as the most artistic and realistic representative of the missing link, and toyed in the reputation he was rapidly making for himself in the show business; but for all that, it was a great relief to throw off the hide of the celebrated man-monkey, drop the exactions of art, and be himself for a whole day.

Nickie did not find, as many celebrated actors have done, that the work of sustaining a grand role day after day, night after night, week after week, and month after month, was too exacting; he bore the strain with consummate ease; moreover, the most conscientious artist wishes to be himself once now and again, if merely for a change.

The shop in Wangaroo occupied by the Museum of Marvels was rented from a Chinese greengrocer, who carried on a business next door.  The place had originally been one shop, but Kit See, with the frugality of his race, had partitioned it roughly, and with Oriental astuteness let the half for nearly as much as he paid for the whole.

Kit See was a stout, cream Confucian with an oleaginous smile, and the gentle, propitiatory man of an inferior people, cunning enough to realise that if you cannot dominate it is wisest to be docile.  He had a good stock, a good business, a half-caste wife, and a noiseless, placid, slit-eyed baby about the size of a Bologna sausage.

The Missing Link discovered this much through a crack in the partition, and amused himself with his eyes glued to the slit when there were no professional demands on his time and talents.

Most things that Mahdi did irritated Ammonia, whose jealousy and hatred were intensified by Nickie’s habit, when in a playful humour, of teasing the gorilla by ostentatiously devouring delicacies Ammonia particularly affected in Ammonia’s sight, almost within his reach.

Nickie’s interest in that hole in the wall was a course of consuming anxiety to Ammonia.  While Mahdi had his eye to the wall, the gorilla would cling to the bars of his cage, pushing his blunt nose through, and gibber and spit and protest in a high-pitched, querulous growl.

“Blime, yiv got the noble Ammonia goin’ this trip, Nickie,” said the Living Skeleton.

“Yes,” replied Nickie, still with his eye to the crack, “that beast will have to learn decency and good conduct, Matty, my man.  I aspire to teach him moral restraint.”