how to discover arsenic in poisoned people’s stomachs, where there is none, and make red, blue, and green fires, finds himself locked in, and is obliged to get out at the window; whilst the professor of medicine, who is holding forth, as usual, to a select very few, has his lecture upon intermittent fever so strangely interrupted by distant harmony and convivial hullaballoo, that he finishes abruptly in a pet, to the great joy of his class.  But Mr. Muff and his friends care not.  They have passed all their troubles—­they are regular medical men, and for aught they care the whole establishment may blow up, tumble down, go to blazes, or anything else in a small way that may completely obliterate it.  In another twelve hours they have departed to their homes, and are only spoken of in the reverence with which we regard the ruins of a by-gone edifice, as bricks who were.

* * * * *

Our task is finished.  We have traced Mr. Muff from the new man through the almost entomological stages of his being to his perfect state; and we take our farewell of him as the “general practitioner.”  In our Physiology we have endeavoured to show the medical student as he actually exists—­his reckless gaiety, his wild frolics, his open disposition.  That he is careless and dissipated we admit, but these attributes end with his pupilage; did they not do so spontaneously, the up-hill struggles and hardly-earned income of his laborious future career would, to use his own terms, “soon knock it all out of him;” although, in the after-waste of years, he looks back upon his student’s revelries with an occasional return of old feelings, not unmixed, however, with a passing reflection upon the lamentable inefficacy of the present course of medical education pursued at our schools and hospitals, to fit a man for future practice.

We have endeavoured in our sketches so to frame them, that the general reader might not be perplexed by technical or local allusions, whilst the students of London saw they were the work of one who had lived amongst them.  And if in some places we have strayed from the strict boundaries of perfect refinement, yet we trust the delicacy of our most sensitive reader has received no wound.  We have discarded our joke rather than lose our propriety; and we have been pleased at knowing that in more than one family circle our Physiology has, now and then, raised a smile on the lips of the fair girls, whose brothers were following the same path we have travelled over at the hospitals.

We hope with the new year to have once more the gratification of meeting our friends.  Until then, with a hand offered in warm fellowship,—­not only to those composing the class he once belonged to, but to all who have been pleased to bestow a few minutes weekly upon his chapters,—­the Medical Student takes his leave.

* * * * *

A CON.  THAT OUGHT TO HAVE BEEN THE COLONEL’S.