Anthropology, he had made me the heir to his entire estate, including
his museum. The latter bequest was unencumbered by any conditions. I
could keep the collection intact, I could sell it as it stood or I could
break it up and distribute the specimens as I chose; but I knew that
Challoner's unexpressed wish was that it should be kept together,
ultimately to form the nucleus of a collection attached to the
Institute.

It was a gray autumn afternoon when I let myself in. A caretaker was in
charge of the house, which was otherwise unoccupied, and the museum,
which was in a separate wing, seemed strangely silent and remote. As the
Yale latch of the massive door clicked behind me, I seemed to be, and in
fact was, cut off from all the world. A mysterious, sepulchral stillness
pervaded the place, and when I entered the long room I found myself
unconsciously treading lightly so as not to disturb the silence; even as
one might on entering some Egyptian tomb-chamber hidden in the heart of
a pyramid.

I halted in the center of the long room and looked about me, and I don't
mind confessing that I felt distinctly creepy. It was not the skeleton
of the whale that hung overhead, with its ample but ungenial smile; it
was not the bandy-legged skeleton of the rachitic camel, nor that of the
aurochs, nor those of the apes and jackals and porcupines in the smaller
glass case; nor the skulls that grinned from the case at the end of the
room. It was the long row of human skeletons, each erect and watchful on
its little pedestal, that occupied the great wall-case: a silent,
motionless company of fleshless sentinels, standing in easy postures
with unchanging, mirthless grins and seeming to wait for something. That
was what disturbed me.