“Oh, here’s a lark!” is all Mr. Muff’s reply.
“Lark!” cries Mr. Rapp; “you’re drunk, Muff—you don’t mean to call that a lark!”
“It’s a beautiful patriarchal old hen,” returns Mr. Muff, “that I bottled as she was meandering down the mews; and now I vote we have her for lunch. Who’s game to kill her?”
Various plans are immediately suggested, including cutting her head off, poisoning her with morphia, or shooting her with a little cannon Mr Rapp has got in his locker; but at last the majority decide upon hanging her. A gibbet is speedily prepared, simply consisting of a thigh-bone laid across two high stools; a piece of whip cord is then noosed round the victim’s neck; and she is launched into eternity, as the newspapers say—Mr. Manhug attending to pull her legs.
“Depend upon it that’s a humane death,” remarks Mr. Jones. “I never tried to strangle a fowl but once, and then I twisted its neck bang off. I know a capital plan to finish cats though.”
“Throw it off—put it up—let’s have it,” exclaim the circle.
“Well, then; you must get their necks in a slip knot and pull them up to a key-hole. They can’t hurt you, you know, because you are the other side the door.
“Oh, capital—quite a wrinkle,” observes Mr. Muff. “But how do you catch them first?”
“Put a hamper outside the leads with some valerian in it, and a bit of cord tied to the lid. If you keep watch, you may bag half-a-dozen in no time; and strange cats are fair game for everybody,—only some of them are rum ’uns to bite.”
At this moment, a new Scotch pupil, who is lulling himself into the belief that he is studying anatomy from some sheep’s eyes by himself in the Museum, enters the dissecting-room, and mildly asks the porter “what a heart is worth?”