He now endeavours, by unremitting attention, to retrieve lost time, and impress the professors favourably in his behalf, for he is now a candidate for graduation, and he dare not go home without his degree. His care-clad face is now seen on the foremost bench, listening with a painful absorption, and taking voluminous notes in a book--not the only thing bound in calf-skin in the room, by long odds--and always asks, with the utmost deference, long explanations on some favourite theory of the lecturer, so dazzlingly original, that he did not perfectly understand it, so bewildered was he by admiration. He smells of the dissecting-room, and takes occasion, when in the presence of the professor of anatomy, of jerking out his handkerchief, and with it the half cut up hand of a subject. He eschews tobacco, whiskey, and women, joins the physiological temperance society, and collects facts for a forthcoming work of the professor of practice. He is a strong vitalist with “Old Charley,” and lies-big with the Liebigian follower of acids and alkalies. He presents the pelvis of the female that obeyed the Lord's ordinance twenty-six times in ten years, to the professor of observations, and has a faculty of making himself generally useful to the whole faculty. I, to return to particularities, had followed after the manner of _first coursers_, and would have been a _fac simile_ of the candidate, or second course student, had it not been for my habitual laziness, and perhaps an overweening confidence in my natural powers of impudence to push me through. I had had one or two fights the previous session, in the college, which brought me favourably, of course, before the notice of the faculty, as a quiet, studious gentleman, and removed all doubts from my mind of my having a safe and honourable passage. I held a high head, but was confoundedly frightened, and often wished that I were not an aspirant for the privilege of being a hired assassin, a slayer, without the victim having a chance to hit back. Many, I say, were my misgivings, as I saw the ides of March, the time for examination, approach, that my want of medical lore might knock me higher than the green baize of medicine could cluster--and yet, never was poor mortal better entitled to write M.D. after his name than I, miserable devil as I was. But fear would not keep back the evil day. The bell sounded for class T to go up and be examined, and away we went slowly, as to a summons for pistols and coffee for two, with feelings resembling those of a gambler who has staked his whole pile, and found at the _call_ that he has been bluffing up against a _greenhorn with “three white aces_.” We were to be examined in separate rooms; our class, consisting of seven members, by as many professors, fifteen minutes being allotted to each professor in which to find out the qualifications of the candidate.