The aid of both hands was called in to assist in supporting her intellectual depository.

This feat accomplished, a roseate gulf was revealed, which would have made the stout heart of Quintus Curtius quail ere he took the awful plunge.

Time or contest had removed the ivory obstructions in the centre, but the shores on each side of the gulf were terrifically iron-bound, and appeared equal to crushing the hardest granite; the shinbone of an ox would have been to her like an oyster to ordinary mortals.

She revelled in this luxurious operation so long, that I began to fear she was suffering from the antipodes to a lockjaw, and that she was unable to close the chasm; but at last the demijohn rose slowly and solemnly from the horizontal, the gulf gradually closed until, obtaining the old angle of forty-five degrees, the two dusty pieces of beefsteak once more stood sentry over the abyss.

Prosecuting my observations along the upper surface, I next came to the proboscis, which suggested the idea of a Bologna sausage after a passage through a cotton-press.