Yes, I had thought of something entirely new. I would take a medical course and would then know for myself whether I suffered from a complication of diseases or whether it was true, as many had tried to convince me, that there was nothing the matter with me. A medical education, too, would be an embellishment that every one could not boast of. I had the necessary time and means to take a course in medicine, having no one dependent upon me. If there had been family cares on my hands, the case would have been different. So I matriculated in a St. Louis medical college during the middle of a term and began the study of the healing art. Now, reader, please do not be shocked too badly if, in this connection, I mention a few slightly uncanny things. I have always noticed, however, that most people do not raise much of a fuss over a diminutive shocking semi-occasionally, provided the act comes about as a natural course of events. There were many things about the college and clinic rooms that were, to me, gruesome and repulsive. The dissecting-room, with its stench and debris from dead bodies, was the crucial test for me. I wonder now that I stayed with it as long as I did. For my dissecting partner I had an uncouth cow-puncher from southern Texas. There were in the college a number of these broad-hatted and rather illiterate fellows from the southwest trying to get themselves metamorphosed into doctors. (I would often feel for their prospective patients.) This man who assisted me on the "stiff," as they call the dissecting material, did the cutting and I looked up the points of anatomy. I preferred to do the literary rather than the sanguinary part of the work. One evening--we did this work at night--we were to dissect and expose all the muscles of the head, so as to make them look as nearly as possible like the colored plates in the anatomy. We were expected to learn the names of all these structures. The memorizing of these terms was no small task, for I remember that one little muscle even bore this outlandish name: _levator labii superioris alaquae nasi_. Anglicized, this would mean that the function of the muscle was to raise the upper lip and dilate the nostril. My companion said that he "didn't see no sense in being so durned scientific." Accordingly he went to work and cut all the flesh off the head and stacked it up on the slab. When the demonstrator of anatomy came by to test our knowledge and to see our work, he asked: "What have you here?" My friend very promptly answered: "A pile of lean meat." This student went by the not very euphonious name of "Lean Meat" from that date.