that the foregoing story, partly told, partly read from a
manuscript, was made to do duty for the regulation papers on
deformed butterflies, fossil ox-horns, prehistoric dung-mixens, and
such like, that usually occupied the more serious attention of the
members.

This Club was of an inclusive and intersocial character; to a
degree, indeed, remarkable for the part of England in which it had
its being--dear, delightful Wessex, whose statuesque dynasties are
even now only just beginning to feel the shaking of the new and
strange spirit without, like that which entered the lonely valley of
Ezekiel's vision and made the dry bones move: where the honest
squires, tradesmen, parsons, clerks, and people still praise the
Lord with one voice for His best of all possible worlds.

The present meeting, which was to extend over two days, had opened
its proceedings at the museum of the town whose buildings and
environs were to be visited by the members. Lunch had ended, and
the afternoon excursion had been about to be undertaken, when the
rain came down in an obstinate spatter, which revealed no sign of
cessation. As the members waited they grew chilly, although it was
only autumn, and a fire was lighted, which threw a cheerful shine
upon the varnished skulls, urns, penates, tesserae, costumes, coats
of mail, weapons, and missals, animated the fossilized ichthyosaurus
and iguanodon; while the dead eyes of the stuffed birds--those
never-absent familiars in such collections, though murdered to
extinction out of doors--flashed as they had flashed to the rising
sun above the neighbouring moors on the fatal morning when the
trigger was pulled which ended their little flight. It was then
that the historian produced his manuscript, which he had prepared,