brethren, he was essentially a man of the
world, fond of studying all sorts and
conditions of men, and with all his enormous
practice finding time for society, theatres,
music, and literature of all kinds. He was
engaged out to dinner that day—to a very
pleasant little dinner, where he was to
have met a private secretary of a cabinet
minister, a newspaper editor, a portrait
painter, a Duke, and a clerk in an insurance
office, who gave wonderful imitations. The
hostess was a French actress, and the cooking
would have been perfect. So Mr.
Godby shook his head very mournfully
over the Helmingham telegram, and had he
not held his old friend Osborne in great
respect, and wished to do him a service, he
would have refused to obey its mandate.
As it was, he resigned himself to his fate,
and arrived, chilled to the bone, but bright-eyed
and ready-witted, at Woolgreaves at
two in the morning. He shook his head
when he saw the patient, and expressed to
Doctor Osborne his doubt of the efficacy of
trepanning, but he proposed to operate at
once.

"It's all over, mother," said Marian to
Mrs. Ashurst, the next morning. "Mr.
Godby was right; poor Tom never rallied,
and sank at seven this morning."

"God help his poor father!" said the old
lady, through her tears;" he has nothing
left him now."

"Nothing!" said Marian—then added,
half unconsciously—" except his money!
except his money!"

ODD MONSTERS.

IT is as good as a nightmare to look at the
pictures in Schenck's History of Monsters, a
little quarto book of memorable human
deformities, published two hundred and sixty years
ago. The author was one of the best physicians
of his time, a voluminous writer who has left
us a thick closely printed folio of the most
interesting cases he had met with in medicine
and surgery, monsters included; but the
monsters have also a little volume to themselves.
We start with a child all body and no head,
but having windows in its breast, for there were
its eyes. Then comes the son of a tailor of
Mecklenburg, who had what seemed to be the
faint suggestion of a face wrapped round with
a great Turkish nightcap. As there seemed to
be a face under a plastic mask, the mask was
removed, and below was revealed a horribly great
mouth which began to roar without a tongue,
and eyes without pupils, behind which fire
seemed to shine ; there was no brain, and there
were no bones to the skull, but the upper part
of the head was twisted up like a tall turban.
The right hand of this child was always open,
the left always doubled into a fist. Doctor
Schenck gives an edifying picture, after the
manner of a modern Valentine, showing the
child's head as it appeared before the mask was
lifted. You may lift the mask here for yourself,
and see what you shall see—not a cupid.
It is hardly worth while to mention children
with cat's heads; or with horns, and a broad
mouth like a whale's, or a young shark's before
its teething; or with pigtails actually growing
from their necks. That latter form must, in
the days of periwig, have been looked upon as
a laudable effort on the part of nature, to keep
pace with the fashions. One child had a goose's
back and wings, another a frog's head, another
large erect hare's ears. A little fellow at
Stettin was born with something like a
tortoiseshell on the top of his head, and a white
mouse's tail peeping out from under it. There
was (was there?) a child born at Basle, in
fifteen hundred and fifty-six, with such wide
nostrils, that his brain could be seen through
them. But then another had no nose at all,
nor eyes, nor ears, only a mouth, and the rest
of the face blank; while another had so much
room in his head that a full-sized arm grew out
from where one of his ears should be. This
monster had also no elbows or knees.

From the commentaries of Sigibert we are
told of the child born at Emmaus in the reign
of Emperor Theodosius, single below the chest,
or chests, but with two chests, arms, and heads.
The two heads were not better than one, for
they were differently affected; one might be
crying while the other laughed, one feeding, the
other sleeping; sometimes they quarrelled, and
there was a fight of the two pairs of arms.
This child is said to have lived two years, one
part dying four days before the other, which
was killed by the decay of its inseparable
neighbour. Cardan tells us of a Milanese girl
with two heads, in all other respects single,
except that she was found after death to have
two stomachs. It would not have been bigamy
to marry her, although in fairness she would be
entitled to a husband with two heads; not the
creature figured by the side of her with two
monkey heads, monkey legs, and a fox's brush,
but possibly the sage two-headed philosopher
figured below her, one of whose heads looks
very much startled at what his other head is
whispering into its ear. There are gentlemen
living who would find it a great convenience,
and whose friends would find it a great
convenience, if they could indulge in this manner
their taste for conversation, and yet keep their
conversation to themselves. Among the
two-headed women was one in Bavaria, aged
twenty-six, of whose two faces one was pretty the
other ugly. In the time of Francis the First
of France, there was a man with two heads,
whose second head grew out of the trunk of
his body, and was carried under his waistcoat.
This head had a secret hunger of its own, that