; his animal functions
are still tolerably well preserved, his spiritual have evaporated long
since; he sleeps well, has no conscience, believes himself to be a
respectable fellow, and is tolerably happy on the days when he is asked
out to dinner.

Poor Pop is not very high in the scale of created beings; but, if you
fancy there is none lower, you are in egregious error. There was once
a man who had a mysterious exhibition of an animal, quite unknown to
naturalists, called "the wusser." Those curious individuals who desired
to see the wusser were introduced into an apartment where appeared
before them nothing more than a little lean shrivelled hideous
blear-eyed mangy pig. Everyone cried out "Swindle!" and "Shame!"
"Patience, gentlemen, be heasy," said the showman: "look at that there
hanimal; it's a perfect phenomaly of hugliness: I engage you never see
such a pig." Nobody ever had seen. "Now, gentlemen," said he, "I'll keep
my promise, has per bill; and bad as that there pig is, look at this
here" (he showed another). "Look at this here, and you'll see at once
that it's A WUSSER." In like manner the Popjoy breed is bad enough, but
it serves only to show off the Galgenstein race; which is WUSSER.

Galgenstein had led a very gay life, as the saying is, for the last
fifteen years; such a gay one, that he had lost all capacity of
enjoyment by this time, and only possessed inclinations without
powers of gratifying them. He had grown to be exquisitely curious and
fastidious about meat and drink, for instance, and all that he wanted
was an appetite. He carried about with him a French cook, who could not
make him eat; a doctor, who could not make him well; a mistress, of whom
he was heartily sick after two days; a priest, who had been a favourite
of the exemplary Dubois, and by turns used to tickle him by the
imposition of penance, or by the repetition of a tale from the recueil
of Noce, or La Fare. All his appetites were wasted and worn; only some
monstrosity would galvanise them into momentary action. He was in that
effete state to which many noblemen of his time had arrived; who were
ready to believe in ghost-raising or in gold-making, or to retire into
monasteries and wear hair-shirts, or to dabble in conspiracies, or to
die in love with little cook-maids of fifteen, or to pine for the smiles
or at the frowns of a prince of the blood, or to go mad at the refusal
of a chamberlain's key. The last gratification he remembere