[Illustration: M^R. CELSUS PHIPPS] was a chemist, not one of your
ordinary men, who put their trust in huge coloured glass bottles, and
drive a large trade in lozenges. No, Phipps was an experimental chemist,
and he acquainted the public with the fact by means of an inscription to
that effect over his door, while he confirmed the neighbours in the
belief by occasional explosions more or less violent. On one occasion he
went so far as to blow the roof off his house, but that, he said, "was
an accident." Moreover, Phipps was a licentiate of Apothecaries' Hall,
and jobbed the paupers at 1½d. a head, including pills and plasters. Mr.
Phipps's establishment was evidently the home for natural philosophy.
Experiments abandoned by every one else were eagerly sought after by
Phipps; and he had a valuable auxiliary in his cat.
When science slumbered, the cat might be seen comfortably dozing on the
door-step; but when anything new in medicine or chemistry turned up, the
cat had an active life of it. The poor thing had taken poison enough to
kill hundreds of rich husbands, and antidotes sufficient to restore
double the number. It had a stomach-pump kept for its especial use. You
might generally guess when anything extraordinary had happened, by
missing the cat from its usual place, and seeing Dick, Mr. Phipps's boy,
who had the job of holding it during the experiments, with slips of
diachylon plaster all over his face and hands. It had become familiar
with prussic acid and arsenic in all their insinuating forms, and had
some slight knowledge of the smaller operations of surgery; still it
went purring about, and was always at hand on an emergency, ready to
have any drug tested on its person. Phipps was proud of it. "My cat,
Tom, sir," he would say, "has done more for its fellow animal, man, than
all the philanthropists that ever taught people to be discontented."
All went on smoothly till the introduction of ether, when Phipps
determined to see if he could extract a tooth from a person under its
influence. The cat, of course, was to be the especial patient. Dick was
summoned, Tom caught, the ether administered, and Phipps selected one of
the largest tusks. But the ether could not have taken proper effect;
for, with a frightful yell, Tom freed himself from Dick's grasp,
favouring him at the same time with severe marks of his esteem, which
made him roar, and disappear, _à la Harlequin_, through the plate-glass
window, doing immense damage to the chemicals and Galenicals displayed
therein.
But Tom soon came back, for no one would have him. Science, who labels
some men F.R.S.'s, or tags half the alphabet to the end of their names,
had not forgotten to mark her humble follower, the cat. He had lost one
ear in some acoustic experiment; one eye was closed for ever, from
having the operation for squinting practically illustrated some dozen
times; and he was lame in one of his hind legs, the tendon having been
cut to exemplify the method of operating for club-foot; while his coat,
once remarkably glossy, had such a second-hand, seedy appearance that it
would not have tempted a Jew.
At last he died, a martyr to science. Phipps had invented some wonderful
pulmonic lozenge, containing a great deal of morphia, which was to cure
coughs at first sight. Tom had been rather asthmatic for some time,
owing to inhaling noxious gases; so Phipps gave him a good dose to begin
with. Next morning he was found very fast asleep, and extremely rigid in
his limbs. Dick suggested that he was dead, but his master indignantly
repudiated the idea; so Tom was kept, in the full expectation that he
would one day start up quite lively, till at length the moth got into
his coat, and Phipps was compelled to consign his furry friend to a
grave in the garden. Phipps never had his usual spirits again. His
experiments were at an end; for though he would sometimes furtively
introduce some drug or other into Dick's tea or beer, that young
gentleman soon found it out, and took his meals ever afterwards with his
mother, who was the proprietress of a veal-and-ham pie depôt in an
adjacent court. Phipps wanders about the College of Surgeons a
melancholy man, and amuses himself dreaming over experiments he would
perform if he could only get such another cat! He is not best pleased
however, when he meets any young friend of Dick's, who violates private
confidence by running after him and inquiring at the very top of his
voice, "Who killed the cat?"