The new man is in ecstasies; he beholds the realization of the Arabian Nights, and when the harmony commences again, he is fairly entranced. At first, he is fearful of adding the efforts of his laryngeal “little muscles with the long names” to swell the chorus; but, after the second glass of stout and a “go of whiskey,” he becomes emboldened, and when the gentleman with the bass voice sings about the Monks of Old, what a jovial race they were, our friend trolls out how “they laughed, ha, ha!” so lustily, that he gets quite red in the face from obstructed jugulars, and applauds, when it has concluded, until everything upon the table performs a curious ballet-dance, which is only terminated by the descent of the cruets upon the floor.
The precise hour at which the new man arrives at home, after this eventful evening, has never been correctly ascertained; having a latch-key, he is the only person that could give any authentic information upon this point; but, unfortunately, he never knows himself. Some few things, however, are universally allowed, namely, that in extreme cases he is found asleep on the rug at the foot of the stairs next morning, with the rushlight that was left in the passage burnt quite away, and all the solder of the candlestick melted into little globules. More frequently he knocks up the people of the neighbouring house, under the impression that it is his own, but that a new keyhole has been fitted to the door in his absence; and, in the mildest forms of the disease, he drinks up all the water in his bed-room during the night, and has a propensity for retiring to rest in his pea-coat and Bluchers, from the obstinate tenacity of his buttons and straps. The first lecture the next morning fails to attract him; he eats no breakfast, and when he enters the dissecting-room about one o’clock, his fellow-students administer to him a pint of ale, warmed by the simple process of stirring it with a hot poker, with some Cayenne pepper thrown into it, which he is assured will set to rights the irritable mucous lining of his stomach. The effect of this remedy is, to send him into a sound sleep during the whole of the two o’clock anatomical lecture; and awakened at its close by the applause of the students, he thinks he is still at the Cyder-cellars, and cries out “Encore!”