prospects of the football season,
the demonstrators, and the lectures. Philip felt himself a great deal
older than the others. They were raw schoolboys. But age is a matter of
knowledge rather than of years; and Newson, the active young man who was
dissecting with him, was very much at home with his subject. He was
perhaps not sorry to show off, and he explained very fully to Philip what
he was about. Philip, notwithstanding his hidden stores of wisdom,
listened meekly. Then Philip took up the scalpel and the tweezers and
began working while the other looked on.

"Ripping to have him so thin," said Newson, wiping his hands. "The
blighter can't have had anything to eat for a month."

"I wonder what he died of," murmured Philip.

"Oh, I don't know, any old thing, starvation chiefly, I suppose.... I say,
look out, don't cut that artery."

"It's all very fine to say, don't cut that artery," remarked one of the
men working on the opposite leg. "Silly old fool's got an artery in the
wrong place."

"Arteries always are in the wrong place," said Newson. "The normal's the
one thing you practically never get. That's why it's called the normal."

"Don't say things like that," said Philip, "or I shall cut myself."

"If you cut yourself," answered Newson, full of information, "wash it at
once with antiseptic. It's the one thing you've got to be careful about.
There was a chap here last year who gave himself only a prick, and he
didn't bother about it, and he got septicaemia."

"Did he get all right?"

"Oh, no, he died in a week. I went and had a look at him in the P. M.
room."

Philip's back ached by the time it was proper to have tea, and his
luncheon had been so light that he was quite ready for it. His hands smelt
of that peculiar odour which he had first noticed that morning in the
corridor. He thought his muffin tasted of it too.

"Oh, you'll get used to that," said Newson. "When you don't have the good
old dissecting-room stink about, you feel quite lonely."

"I'm not going to let it spoil my appetite," said Philip, as he followed
up the muffin with a piece of cake.

LV

Philip's ideas of the life of medical students, like those of the public
at large, were founded on the pictures which Charles Dickens drew in the
middle of the nineteenth century. He soon discovered that Bob Sawyer, if
he ever existed, was no longer at all like the medical student of the
present.

It is a mixed lot which enters upon th