No sooner do the geese become asphyxiated by torsion of their cervical
_vertebrae_, in anticipation of Michaelmas-day; no sooner do the pheasants
feel premonitory warnings, that some chemical combinations between
charcoal, nitre, and sulphur, are about to take place, ending in a
precipitation of lead; no sooner do the columns of the newspapers teem
with advertisements of the ensuing courses at the various schools, each
one cheaper, and offering more advantages than any of the others; the
large hospitals vaunting their extended field of practice, and the small
ones ensuring a more minute and careful investigation of disease, than the
new man purchases a large trunk and a hat-box, buys a second-hand copy of
Quain's Anatomy, abjures the dispensing of his master's surgery in the
country, and placing himself in one of those rattling boxes denominated by
courtesy second-class carriages, enters on the career of a hospital pupil
in his first season.

The opening lecture introduces the new man to his companions, and he is
easily distinguished at that annual gathering of pupils, practitioners,
professors, and especially old hospital governors, who do a good deal in
the gaiter-line, and applaud the lecturer with their umbrellas, as they
sit in the front row. The new man is known by his clothes, which incline
to the prevalent fashion of the rural districts he has quitted; and he
evinces an affection for cloth-boots, or short Wellingtons with double
soles, and toes shaped like a toad's mouth, a propensity which sometimes
continues throughout the career of his pupilage. He likewise takes off his
hat when he enters the dissecting-room, and thinks that beautiful design
is shown in the mechanism and structure of the human body--an idea which
gets knocked out of him at the end of the season, when he looks upon the
distribution of the nerves as "a blessed bore to get up, and no use to him
after he has passed." But at first he perpetually carries a