ve the Shepherd Kings been giving
trouble?"

"No," she replied; "but I thought I might as well get them done. So I
dropped in at the Ormond Street library on my way home and finished
them."

"Then they are ready for stuffing now?"

"Yes." As she answered she caught my astonished eye (for a stuffed
Shepherd King is undoubtedly a somewhat surprising phenomenon) and
laughed softly.

"We mustn't talk in riddles like this," she said, "before Doctor
Berkeley, or he will turn us both into pillars of salt. My father is
referring to my work," she explained to me.

"Are you a taxidermist, then?" I asked.

She hastily set down the cup that she was raising to her lips and broke
into a ripple of quiet laughter.

"I am afraid my father has misled you with his irreverent expressions.
He will have to atone by explaining."

"You see, Doctor," said Mr. Bellingham, "Ruth is a literary searcher--"

"Oh, don't call me a 'searcher'!" Miss Bellingham protested. "It
suggests the female searcher at a police-station. Say investigator."

"Very well, investigator or investigatrix, if you like. She hunts up
references and bibliographies at the Museum for people who are writing
books. She looks up everything that has been written on a given subject,
and then, when she has crammed herself to bursting-point with facts, she
goes to her client and disgorges and crams him or her, and he or she
finally disgorges into the Press."

"What a disgusting way to put it!" said his daughter. "However, that is
what it amounts to. I am a literary jackal, a collector of provender for
the literary lions. Is that quite clear?"

"Perfectly. But I don't think that, even now, I quite understand about
the stuffed Shepherd Kings."

"Oh, it was not the Shepherd Kings who were to be stuffed. It was the
author! That was mere obscurity of speech on the part of my father. The
position is this: A venerable archdeacon wrote an article on the
patriarch Joseph--"

"And didn't know anything about him," interrupted Mr. Bellingham, "and
got tripped up by a specialist who did, and then got shirty--"

"Nothing of the kind," said Miss Bellingham. "He knew as much as
venerable archdeacons ought to know; but the expert knew more. So the
archdeacon commissioned me to collect the literature on the state of
Egypt at the end of the seventeenth dynasty, which I have done; and
to-morrow I shall go and stuff him, as my father expresses it, and
then--"

"And then," Mr. Belling