The interior of the parlor had astonished me; but a sight of the bedroom was a new sensation—­not of the most agreeable kind.  The couch on which the philosopher sought repose after his labors was a truckle-bed that would not have fetched half a crown at a sale.  On one side of it dangled from the ceiling a complete male skeleton, looking like all that was left of a man who might have hung himself about a century ago, and who had never been disturbed since the moment of his suicide.  On the other side of the bed stood a long press, in which I observed hideous colored preparations of the muscular system, and bottles with curious, twining, thread-like substances inside them, which might have been remarkable worms or dissections of nerves, scattered amicably side by side with the Professor’s hair-brush (three parts worn out), with remnants of his beard on bits of shaving-paper, with a broken shoe-horn, and with a traveling looking-glass of the sort usually sold at sixpence apiece.  Repetitions of the litter of books in the parlor lay all about over the floor; colored anatomical prints were nailed anyhow against the walls; rolled-up towels were scattered here, there, and everywhere in the wildest confusion, as if the room had been bombarded with them; and last, but by no means least remarkable among the other extraordinary objects in the bed-chamber, the stuffed figure of a large unshaven poodle-dog, stood on an old card-table, keeping perpetual watch over a pair of the philosopher’s black breeches twisted round his forepaws.

I had started, on entering the room, at the skeleton, and I started once more at the dog.  The old servant noticed me each time with a sardonic grin.  “Don’t be afraid,” he said; “one is as dead as the other.”  With these words, he left me to wash my hands.

Finding little more than a pint of water at my disposal, and failing altogether to discover where the soap was kept, I was not long in performing my ablutions.  Before leaving the room, I looked again at the stuffed poodle.  On the board to which he was fixed, I saw painted in faded letters the word “Scarammuccia,” evidently the comic Italian name to which he had answered in his lifetime.  There was no other inscription; but I made up my mind that the dog must have been the Professor’s pet, and that he kept the animal stuffed in his bedroom as a remembrance of past times.  “Who would have suspected so great a philosopher of having so much heart!” thought I, leaving the bedroom to go downstairs again.

The Professor had done his breakfast, and was anxious to begin the sitting; so I took out my chalks and paper, and set to work at once—­I seated on one pile of books and he on another.

“Fine anatomical preparations in my room, are there not, Mr. Kerby?” said the old gentleman.  “Did you notice a very interesting and perfect arrangement of the intestinal ganglia?  They form the subject of an important chapter in my great work.”