“I am afraid you will think me very ignorant,” I replied.  “But I really do not know the intestinal ganglia when I see them.  The object I noticed with most curiosity in your room was something more on a level with my own small capacity.”

“And what was that?” asked the Professor.

“The figure of the stuffed poodle.  I suppose he was a favorite of yours?”

“Of mine?  No, no; a young woman’s favorite, sir, before I was born; and a very remarkable dog, too.  The vital principle in that poodle, Mr. Kerby, must have been singularly intensified.  He lived to a fabulous old age, and he was clever enough to play an important part of his own in what you English call a Romance of Real Life!  If I could only have dissected that poodle, I would have put him into my book; he should have headed my chapter on the Vital Principle of Beasts.”

“Here is a story in prospect,” thought I, “if I can only keep his attention up to the subject.”

“He should have figured in my great work, sir,” the Professor went on.  “Scarammuccia should have taken his place among the examples that prove my new theory; but unfortunately he died before I was born.  His mistress gave him, stuffed, as you see upstairs, to my father to take care of for her, and he has descended as an heirloom to me.  Talking of dogs, Mr. Kerby, I have ascertained, beyond the possibility of doubt, that the brachial plexus in people who die of hydrophobia—­but stop!  I had better show you how it is—­the preparation is upstairs under my wash-hand stand.”

He left his seat as he spoke.  In another minute he would have sent the servant to fetch the “preparation,” and I should have lost the story.  At the risk of his taking offense, I begged him not to move just then, unless he wished me to spoil his likeness.  This alarmed, but fortunately did not irritate him.  He returned to his seat, and I resumed the subject of the stuffed poodle, asking him boldly to tell me the story with which the dog was connected.  The demand seemed to impress him with no very favorable opinion of my intellectual tastes; but he complied with it, and related, not without many a wearisome digression to the subject of his great work, the narrative which I propose calling by the name of “The Yellow Mask.”  After the slight specimens that I have given of his character and style of conversation, it will be almost unnecessary for me to premise that I tell this story as I have told the last, and “Sister Rose,” in my own language, and according to my own plan in the disposition of the incidents—­adding nothing, of course, to the facts, but keeping them within the limits which my disposable space prescribes to me.

I may perhaps be allowed to add in this place, that I have not yet seen or heard of my portrait in an engraved state.  Professor Tizzi is still alive; but I look in vain through the publishers’ lists for an announcement of his learned work on the Vital Principle.  Possibly he may be adding a volume or two to the twelve already completed, by way of increasing the debt which a deeply obliged posterity is, sooner or later, sure of owing to him.