"Come over here!"
The girl peeped through the trap-door into the cellar. There, in a number of pens, were huddled a small menagerie of animals,—dogs, cats, guinea-pigs, rabbits.
"What do you do with all of them?" the girl asked, her heart sinking with foreboding.
"Cut 'em up!"
"Cut them up?"
"Sure! And dose 'em. This is an experimental laboratory." The doctor waved his hand rather grandly over the dirty room. "There are not many like it in the city of Chicago, I can tell you. I am conducting investigations, and I use these little fellers."
"It's horrid!" the girl exclaimed, looking apprehensively at Pete.
"Not a bit of it!" The doctor reached down his hand and pulled up a rabbit, a little mangy object, which tottered a few steps and then fell down as if dizzy. "Jack's had fifteen drops of the solution of hydrochlorate of manganese this morning. He looks kind of dopy, don't he? He'll be as smart as a trivet to-morrow. But I guess he's about reached his limit of hydrochlorate, eh, Jack?"
In spite of herself the girl's curiosity was aroused, and when the doctor had returned Jack to his pen, she asked, "What's that queer machine over there?"
"That's to pump things into your body, to squirt medicines into you, instead of dropping them into your tummy loose, as doctors usually do. See? When I stick this long needle into you and work this handle, a little stream of the thing I want to give you is pumped into your body at the right spot. Have you got anything the matter with your liver? I am working on livers just now. Would you like to have me try it on you? No! I thought not. That's why Jack has to take his dose every morning."