The instructors demonstrated the viscera, which, with the muscles and other “soft parts” were removed piecemeal, and disposed of daily. Whitman’s tremendously realistic line, “What is removed drops horribly into the pail,” always takes me back to the dissecting room with its repulsive odours and its sorry sights. But our growing interest did much to mitigate the repellent features. The actual dissection was interesting and easy for me, but it was not easy to demonstrate the muscles and groups of muscles, for it was always difficult to comprehend their action. Never having been able to understand levers and pulleys and mechanical things, I could not reason out things which were so obvious to others. It was absurd, after getting the muscles nicely dissected, with their points of origin and insertion before my very eyes, to be unable to deduce what their actions were. I had no “gumption.” This inability on my part puzzled the Demonstrator and his assistants--the senior students, who moved about from table to table, listening to our recitations whenever we would get a group of muscles exposed for demonstration. One dignified senior who was usually on hand to hear me recite, was painstaking in trying to make me understand their action: “Why, can’t you see?” he would ask; then, convinced that I could not, would try to drill it into my head. His dignified air awed me considerably, and I was demure and respectful to him, always calling him “Doctor” as, in the freshness of our first-year’s awe of them, we supposed we had to call the seniors. But one day, when in the reading room, I saw him try to kiss one of the senior girls, my awe vanished; after that I was a trifle pert and independent. It was funny how my whole attitude then changed toward him. I suddenly saw through the mock dignity he carried while in the dissecting room. In vain he tried to impress me with his gravity, I only laughed in his face. So we soon got on fairly friendly terms, as much as a humble junior and a “grave and reverend senior” could be. Sometimes I surprised him looking at me with a quizzical, half-amused look that changed to a frown and an attempt at dignity, when he saw I was observing him. I imagine he quite enjoyed the deference of my earlier manner, and was not a little annoyed at the discovery which had disillusioned me.