I shall never forget the repugnance as well as the embarrassment I felt at beginning our task. The young men in our class, as new as were we to it all, were awed as well as we, but those horrid middlers and seniors looking on with amusement! I felt my face getting redder and redder, and Miss Bigelow’s cheeks looked as though they would burst; but with downcast eyes we kept at work, probably taking far more pains than we needed to. I can see just how gingerly we held the sponges; the wax stuck; we thought we had to get off every speck. Then Miss Bigelow, without looking up, whispered, “What shall we do with the pail?” “Empty it, I suppose,” I snapped out; and getting up courage enough to glance round the room, spied a sink. Stooping, I picked up the loathsome pail and, with blazing cheeks, started across the room, feeling that a great indignity was being undergone--to have to do this at all was bad enough (I still think it was janitor’s work), but it was intolerable to do it before those idle middlers. Before I had taken many steps a young man in our class came up, took the pail from me, and in a soothing tone said, “Please let me--now the worst is over, Miss Arnold.” The tears started at his kindness. The other young men must have felt ashamed, for they soon rallied round the table, showing us how to make the first incisions, how to hold our scalpels and tissue forceps, in fact, giving us many useful hints. We had had the theory, but to make the actual incisions, to lift the skin and deftly dissect it from the tissues beneath--was different from what we had imagined. Going from student to student, the Demonstrator instructed and encouraged each in turn. Soon the room, thinned of its spectators, took on a different aspect: the novices bent over their work with interest and absorption. The painful emotion I had felt at seeing those bodies, stripped and at the mercy of our little knives and forceps, soon gave place to genuine enthusiasm. I dreaded the feel of the cold skin, but once that was removed, I was all interest; one then lost sight of the human side, and saw only the beautiful mechanism. How wonderful it seemed when I had the external abdominal muscle laid bare, and its structure disclosed, and this and the other muscles and their adaptations seen! Some days later when one of the girls, working on an arm, had the deltoid exposed, I was surprised to hear one of the assistant demonstrators (a woman) say to her, “It is a pretty muscle, isn’t it?” “Pretty” seemed such an incongruous word to use, but I soon learned to admire the well-dissected muscles, though rather than “pretty” I should have called them “beautiful.”