herself on fire reading penny romances in bed, on one side of the
hospital, to the tipsy glazier who bundled off his perch and spiked
himself upon the area rails on the other. He becomes a walking chronicle
of pathological statistics, and after he has passed six weeks in the
wards, imagines himself an embryo Hunter.

To keep up his character, a new man ought perpetually to carry a
stethoscope--a curious instrument, something like a sixpenny toy trumpet
with its top knocked off, and used for the purpose of hearing what people
are thinking about, or something of the kind. In the endeavour to acquire
a perfect knowledge of its use he is indefatigable. There is scarcely a
patient but he knows the exact state of their thoracic viscera, and he
talks of enlarged semilunar valves, and thickened ventricles with an air
of alarming confidence. And yet we rather doubt his skill upon this point;
we never perceived anything more than a sound and a jog, something similar
to what you hear in the cabin of a fourpenny steam-boat, and especially
mistrusted the "metallic tinkling," and the noise resembling a
blacksmith's bellows blowing into an empty quart-pot, which is called the
_bruit de soufflet_. Take our word, when medicine arrives at such a pitch
that the secrets of the human heart can be probed, it need not go any
further, and will have the power of doing mischief enough.

The new man does not enter much into society. He sometimes asks a few
other juniors to his lodgings, and provides tea and shrimps, with
occasional cold saveloys for their refection, and it is possible he may
add some home-made wine to the banquet. Their conversation is exceedingly
professional; and should they get slightly jocose, they retail anatomical
paradoxes, technical puns, and legendary "catch questions," which from
time immemorial have been the delight of all new men in general, and
country ones in particular.