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252 satisfied with their actions and. contented with the result.

The doctor had been accustomed most of his life to good cookery, and therefore, perhaps, a raw beefsteak would have given him, if he had not been so hard pressed, as much horror to contemplate as a raw baroness, yet the "devil drives when need drives." He had not tasted fluid for forty-eight hours and, like his comrade, he was desperate.

A peculiar sense of repugnance and loathing passed over him as he bared the throat of the dead woman, while he abhorred her with an intensity that was irresistible; then all at once those unworthy emotions towards that poor victim whom they had sacrificed to their necessities, passed from his mind, and a servile admiration took the place. Her breast was white and soft, if thin now, for with her sex's vanity she had protected it as well as she could from those sun glances. In the second glance which the scientist gave her she appeared to him as a beautiful martyr.

Then all at once the privation and wild-beast instinct woke up within him, the thirst and hunger-lust which holds man still the slave of the earth. He was a tiger and a fox combined. In an instant he had relapsed ages, when conscience was a sentiment unknown to man. The blue, round, snowy breasts did not appeal to his cultivated senses now, except as the child and the beast regard them, soft pillows to rest against while they suck.

"Who is to drink first, before I cut, comrade?"

Horrible words and awful title at such a time, with this dead and warm woman lying before these savages, ready, as woman ever is, to be the mother and feed her sons, natural and adopted, with her milk or with her blood. Oh, woman! who would not overlook your