The first course of medical lectures the _student_ attends, is generally distinguished by his devotion to everything but his studies. At the commencement of the lectures he purchases a blank-book, for the ostensible purpose of taking notes of the lectures; but unwittingly his fingers, instead of tracing the chirographical characters, are engaged in caricaturing the professor, who is endeavouring to beat into his and a few hundred kindred heads, the difference between a dirty Israelite and the 'nasty moses of an artery. He devotes the midnight hour to dissecting--pigs-feet, grouse, and devilled bones, or the delicate structure of the epicurean oyster. He strengthens his voice by making the short hours of the night-clad street alive with the agreeable annunciation, especially to nervous invalids and sick children, that he “will not go home till morning.” He astonishes the professor of chemistry when lecturing upon electricity, by placing a few pounds of powder in communication with the machine, and blowing the laboratory to atoms, when the experiments are going on. He forms a pleasant surprise for his landlady by slipping into the dining-hall when the meats are on the table, and slyly inserting a dead baby, stolen from the dissecting-room, under the cover, in place of the abstracted pig, producing a pleasant sensation when discovered, and giving a good appetite to the boarders. He puts quick-lime into the young ladies' puff-box, and gives them a wash of lunar caustic to allay the irritation. He and the janitor go halves in raising game-cocks, and the expenses of a whole winter's lectures are often bet on a _main_. There is always some medical book that he wishes to purchase, of course very expensive--and to obtain which he is always writing home for money to parents or guardian. John Smith suffers, and always appears in the police reports, when the first course student is put in the watch-house, and let off by the kind-hearted mayor next morning, on paying fees and promising to amend. To sum up the whole, the first course, with few exceptions, conducts himself in such a manner, that but little injustice is done him when he is classed with free negroes, rowdies, and low-flung draymen. But the second course--phew! what a change comes over the fellow! You would think, to see him, that when he was born, gravity and soberness had given up the ghost, and their disembodied spirits found a carnal habitation in his cranium.