The Works of George W. M. Reynolds — page 255: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

238 THE COURT OF LONDON case you must have a dissecting-room, and it is there that I propose to leave this infant corpse for the present. Now conduct me to your dissecting-room, doctor.”’ Maravelli took up the lamp, while Loftus, having secured the telltale cambric handkerchief and flannel about his person, enveloped the tiny corpse in the canvas, and with his loathsome burden followed the doctor, who led him through the hall opening from a dark passage at the end. This place was fitted up with all the grim, hideous ma- chinery and apparatus of a dissecting-room. There was the pulley fixed to the ceiling, with the cord and the hook attached thereto,.so as to elevate at will a corpse when stretched upon the slightly inclining plane of the leaden table over which the cordage hung. ‘There were scalpels, dissecting-knives, saws, trepanning instruments, and various anatomical implements, pails also, to catch the fluids and the entrails of the subjects, and mops to cleanse the floor. In a word, the studio was complete for its ghastly purpose, and although there was no corpse at the moment when Maravelli led Jocelyn in, yet was there a faint, sickly odour against which the heart heaved. It seemed as if the clammy, nauseating smell of the dead had settled itself in that place, clinging to the very ceiling and walls lke a grave- mist, fetid and inexpulsable. | Against the wall stood two upright boxes, tall, narrow, and painted black. One of the doors had by some accident come open, revealing a bleached skeleton as the ghastly tenant of that wooden home. ‘‘ These are the bones of a murderer, who was guillotined about seven years ago in the market-place,”’ said the physi- clan, pointing to the object just named. “ The other box contains the skeleton of his wife, who suffered death with him and for the same cause. I obtained possession of their corpses after their execution, and have preserved their bones thus. Where the vertebre of the neck were severed by the axe of the guillotine, I have fastened the bones with wire. But Loftus did not pay any particular attention to these anatomies, which were in reality the objects of the physician’s special admiration, and having deposited the corpse of the child upon the leaden table, he turned away from the dis- secting-room. ““T shall not insult you by demanding the key of that CORMELIOO KES (E(0)