As I have said, the laboratory was composed of a courtyard between two blocks of buildings. The one on the left was pierced with large bay windows on its one story, and on its ground floor. It seemed to me to be merely two large rooms—one above the other. I only saw the higher one, which was elaborately equipped—an apothecary’s cupboard, marble tables covered with bulbs, bottles and retorts, cases (open), sets of polished instruments, and two indescribable pieces of apparatus of glass and nickel, which recalled nothing analogous, except, perhaps, vaguely, the round globes screwed to a stand on which café waiters lay their napkins.
The other block which was beyond my range, looked from the outside like an ordinary dwelling-house, and was evidently the place where the two assistants lodged.
But, what I had taken for a farmyard on the day of my arrival, took up all my attention.
What a miserable farmyard! Its walls were fitted with wire-netted compartments of various sizes, which rose, piled on one another, to an immense height.
In these lodges, each duly labeled, rabbits, guinea-pigs, rats, cats and other animals which I could not distinguish because of the distance, moved about painfully, or remained lying, half-hidden under the straw.
Some litter, however, was jumping about, but I could not perceive the cause. A nest of mice, I presumed.
The last cage on the right served as a hen-house. Contrary to custom, they had locked up the poultry in it.
Everything looked mute and melancholy. Four hens and a cock, of rare breed, were carrying on a more cheerful kind of life, and strutted about cackling on the concrete floor, pecking at it persistently, in the vain hope of discovering corn or worms.
In the middle of the yard there was a large hollow square of gratings. These were the kennels.
Between the two rows of compartments, like philosophers that were both Cynics and Peripatetics, dogs, with a resigned look, walked up and down—ordinary terriers, butcher’s lurchers, watch-dogs, bull-terriers, a ruffianly bulldog and mongrel bloodhounds—in fact, a whole pack of coarse, good-for-nothing-but-fidelity beasts.