Mystery Shrouds Spouter Ousting

A very dead porpoise has suddenly come alive to the nostrils of visitors to the Museum of Comparative Zoology. So startling was the odor that museum staff members still can't agree why the stuffed specimen was hastily whisked off exhibit and exiled to a corner of the Museum's fifth floor.

It started about two months ago, when shirt-sleeved visitors to the Museum's third floor began giving the mammal-on-a-stick plenty of breathing, and smelling space.

"All stuffed animals smell one way or another," Barbara L. Schevill, curator of Mammals, reported yesterday. According to Miss Schevill, the four-foot cetacean was removed from the exhibition rooms when the sea-blue paint that covered it began to run.

But Henry Foy, the museum's head janitor, has a different story. "It stinks," he declares. "Got so we couldn't work around it. Then they moved it up here. When you open the window you can...See what I mean?"