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A MAYOR’S NEST.

Our friend the Sir Peter Laureate wishes to know whether the work upon “Horal Surgery” is not a new-invented description of almanack, as it is announced as

[Illustration:  CURTIS ON THE EAR[1]]

    [1] Qy.  Year.—­Printer’s Devil.

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THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE LONDON MEDICAL STUDENT.

5.—­OF HIS MATURITY, AND LATIN EXAMINATION.

The second season arrives, and our pupil becomes “a medical student” in the fullest sense of the word.  He has an indistinct recollection that there are such things as wards in the hospital as well as in a key or the city, and a vague wandering, like the morning’s impression of the dreams of the preceding night, that in the remote dark ages of his career he took some notes upon the various lectures, the which have long since been converted into pipe-lights or small darts, which, twisted up and propelled from between the forefingers of each hand, fly with unerring aim across the theatre at the lecturer’s head, the slumbering student, or any other object worth aiming at—­an amusing way of beguiling the hour’s lecture, and only excelled by the sport produced, if he has the good luck to sit in a sunbeam, from making a tournament of “Jack-o’-lanthorns” on the ceiling.  His locker in the lobby of the dissecting-room has long since been devoid of apron, sleeves, scalpels, or forceps; but still it is not empty.  Its contents are composed of three bellpull-handles, a valuable series of shutter-fastenings, two or three broken pipes, a pewter “go” (which, if everybody had their own, would in all probability belong to Mr. Evans, of Covent Garden Piazza), some scraps of biscuit, and a round knocker, which forcibly recalls a pleasant evening he once spent, with the accompanying anecdotes of how he “bilked the pike” at Waterloo Bridge, and poor Jones got “jug’d” by mistake.

It must not, however, be supposed that the student now neglects visiting the dissecting-room.  On the contrary, he is unremitting in his attendance, and sometimes the first there of a morning, more especially when he has, to use his own expression, been “going it rather fast than otherwise” the evening before, and comes to the school very early in the morning to have a good wash and refresh himself previously to snatching a little of the slumber he has forgotten to take during the night, which he enjoys very quietly in the injecting-room down stairs, amidst a heterogeneous assemblage of pipkins, subjects, deal coffins, sawdust, inflated stomachs, syringes, macerating tubs, and dried preparations.  The dissecting-room is also his favourite resort for refreshment, and he broils sprats and red herrings on the fire-shovel with consummate skill, amusing himself during the process of his culinary