ng for damages with the owner of the horses and the frantic
person in the woman's nightdress, Matty Cann, the' Living Skeleton, and
Nicholas Crips, the Missing Link, were allowed their liberty. The Living
Skeleton went home to the bosom of his affectionate family, with stern
instructions to carefully regulate his diet, and Nickie went on to
Winyip, sworn to preserve professional secrets, and bound to hold himself
in readiness for resumption of duties at a day's notice.

Nickie wore a good suit of store clothes, he bore on his rascally head
quite a reputable hat, his linen was fairly meritorious, his boots were
above reproach, he wore socks like a man accustomed to luxuries, he was
clean-shaven, he jingled money in his pocket. In his varied career Nickie
had had ups and downs; true, his "ups" had been brief, but they were
frequent enough to keep him almost in touch with respectability. At
Winyip, a considerable township in its way, he passed quite easily for a
dramatic artist taking rest and change to dissipate brain fag, the result
of too studious application to his art.

When the Professor was himself again he called his company together and
descended upon Corner Stone. The caravan remained at Corner Stone for a
night and a day, and then moved on to Winyip. Nickie the Kid, for some
reason of his own, strongly opposed the trip to Winyip; possibly because
he was reluctant to appear as a mere man-monkey with a demoralised head
and a rudimentary tail in a township in which he had recently figured to
great advantage as Crips Nicholas, the eminent Shakespearean actor.

Winyip proved to be an excellent show town and Mahdi, the Missing Link,
came in for a good deal of attention, although his performance was more
subdued than ordinarily, and he showed little of the actor's natural
anxiety to monopolise the limelight, but a local moral reformer wrote to
the "Winyip Advertiser and Porkkakeboorabool Standard" enlaring on the
shocking action of a depraved showman in keeping this poor heathen, which
was "almost a human creature," confined in a cage like a beast of the
field. The disputation that followed was kept alive by Professor Thunder.

People flocked to see the wonderful man-monkey, and on the afternoon of
the second day came a tall, stern woman of about forty. She was nearly
six feet high, her nose was large, her chin small and sliding, and she
wore glasses. Across her left arm she nursed a large, shabby umbrella,
and her h