men of the world while their _confreres_ in England are still magnified
schoolboys.

High up in a third flat in Howe Street one, Thomas Dimsdale, was going
through his period of probation in a little bedroom and a large
sitting-room, which latter, "more studentium," served the purpose of
dining-room, parlour, and study. A dingy sideboard, with four still
more dingy chairs and an archaeological sofa, made up the whole of the
furniture, with the exception of a circular mahogany centre-table,
littered with note-books and papers. Above the mantelpiece was a
fly-blown mirror with innumerable cards and notices projecting in a
fringe all around, and a pair of pipe racks flanking it on either side.
Along the centre of the side-board, arranged with suspicious neatness,
as though seldom disturbed, stood a line of solemn books, Holden's
_Osteology_, Quain's _Anatomy_, Kirkes' _Physiology_, and Huxley's
_Invertebrata_, together with a disarticulated human skull. On one side
of the fireplace two thigh bones were stacked; on the other a pair of
foils, two basket-hilted single-sticks, and a set of boxing-gloves.
On a shelf in a convenient niche was a small stock of general
literature, which appeared to have been considerably more thumbed than
the works upon medicine. Thackeray's _Esmond_ and Meredith's _Richard
Feveret_ rubbed covers with Irving's _Conquest of Granada_ and a
tattered line of paper-covered novels. Over the sideboard was a framed
photograph of the Edinburgh University Football Fifteen, and opposite it
a smaller one of Dimsdale himself, clad in the scantiest of garb, as he
appeared after winning the half-mile at the Inter-University Handicap.
A large silver goblet, the trophy of that occasion, stood underneath
upon a bracket. Such was the student's chamber upon the morning in
question, save that in a roomy arm-chair in the corner the young
gentleman himself was languidly reclining, with a short wooden pipe in