the dissecting-room. On the contrary, he is unremitting in his attendance,
and sometimes the first there of a morning, more especially when he has,
to use his own expression, been "going it rather fast than otherwise" the
evening before, and comes to the school very early in the morning to have
a good wash and refresh himself previously to snatching a little of the
slumber he has forgotten to take during the night, which he enjoys very
quietly in the injecting-room down stairs, amidst a heterogeneous
assemblage of pipkins, subjects, deal coffins, sawdust, inflated stomachs,
syringes, macerating tubs, and dried preparations. The dissecting-room is
also his favourite resort for refreshment, and he broils sprats and red
herrings on the fire-shovel with consummate skill, amusing himself during
the process of his culinary arrangements by sawing the corners off the
stone mantel-piece, throwing cinders at the new man, or seeing how long it
takes to bore a hole through one of the stools with a red-hot poker.
Indeed, these luckless pieces of furniture are always marked out by the
student as the fittest objects on which to wreak his destructive
propensities; and he generally discovers that the readiest way to do them
up is to hop steeple-chases upon them from one end of the room to the
other--a sporting amusement which shakes them to pieces, and irremediably
dislocates all their articulations, sooner than anything else. Of course
these pleasantries are only carried on in the absence of the demonstrator.
Should he be present, the industry of the student is confined to poking
the fire in the stove and then shutting the flue, or keeping down the ball
of the cistern by some abdominal hooks, and then, before the invasion of
smoke and water takes place, quietly joining a knot of new men who are
strenuously endeavouring to dissect the brain and discover the
_hippocampus major_, which they expect to find in the perfect similitude
of a sea-horse, like the web-footed quadrupeds who paw the "reality" in
the "area usually devoted to illusion," or tank, at the Adelphi Theatre.