The red globules appeared cleanly circular, flattened, biconcave, and without notches, indentations or spheroidal swellings.
The white globules changed their shape, taking at intervals the spherical form, and varying their shapes again by delicate expansions.

I was not deceived then, it was a torpid man that I had under my eyes, and not a dead one! I placed him on a pair of scales.

He weighed one hundred and forty pounds, clothing included.

I did not care to undress him, for I had noticed that animals desiccated directly in contact with the air, died oftener than those which remained covered with moss and other soft materials, during the ordeal of desiccation.
My great air-pump, with its immense platform, its enormous oval wrought-iron receiver, which a rope running on a pulley firmly fixed in the ceiling easily raised and lowered by means of a windlass--all these thousand and one contrivances which I had so laboriously prepared in spite of the railleries of those who envied me, and which I felt desolate at seeing unemployed, were going to find their use! Unexpected circumstances had arisen at last to procure me such a subject for experiment, as I had in vain endeavored to procure, while I was attempting to reduce to torpidity dogs, rabbits, sheep and other mammals by the aid of freezing mixtures.

Long ago, without doubt, would these results have been attained if I had been aided by those who surrounded me, instead of being made the butt of their railleries; if our authorities had sustained me with their influence instead of treating me as a subversive spirit.
I shut myself up _tete-a-tete_ with the Colonel, and took care that even old Getchen, my housekeeper, now deceased, should not trouble me during my work.