“Then the man was a pauper from the workhouse?”
“Are workhouse paupers usually fat and well-fed?”
“Well, no—come to think of it, not as a rule.”
“In fact, it struck Tommy Pringle and his friend that this was something a little out of the way in a workhouse subject?”
“And if the alimentary canal was so entertaining to these gentlemen, I imagine the subject had come by his death shortly after a full meal.”
“Yes—oh, yes—he’d have had to, wouldn’t he?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Lord Peter. “That’s in your department, you know. That would be your inference, from what they said.”
“Yes; you wouldn’t, for example, expect them to make that observation if the patient had been ill for a long time and fed on slops.”
“Well, you see, you really know a lot about it. On Tuesday week you were dissecting the arm muscles of a rheumatic middle-aged Jew, of sedentary habits, who had died shortly after eating a heavy meal, of some injury producing spinal haemorrhage and nervous lesions, and so forth, and who was presumed to come from the workhouse?”
“And you could swear to those facts, if need were?”
“Well, if you put it in that way, I suppose I could.”
Mr. Piggott sat for some moments in contemplation.
“I say,” he said at last, “I did know all that, didn’t I?”
“Oh, yes—you knew it all right—like Socrates’s slave.”
“A person in a book I used to read as a boy.”
“Oh—does he come in ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’?”
“No—another book—I daresay you escaped it. It’s rather dull.”
“I never read much except Henty and Fenimore Cooper at school.... But—have I got rather an extra good memory, then?”
“You have a better memory than you credit yourself with.”
“Then why can’t I remember all the medical stuff? It all goes out of my head like a sieve.”
“Well, why can’t you?” said Lord Peter, standing on the hearthrug and smiling down at his guest.
“Well,” said the young man, “the chaps who examine one don’t ask the same sort of questions you do.”
“No—they leave you to remember all by yourself. And it’s beastly hard. Nothing to catch hold of, don’t you know? But, I say—how did you know about Tommy Pringle being the funny man and—”
“No; I know. But how did you know he’d be there if you did ask? I mean to say—I say,” said Mr. Piggott, who was becoming mellowed by influences themselves not unconnected with the alimentary canal—“I say, are you rather clever, or am I rather stupid?”