pulled him into a large room where there were three young men who acted as Knox’s assistants.

And there they were in the midst of a great number of coarse tables, with one large one in the middle, whereon were deposited—each having its portion—masses or lumps of some matter which could not be seen by reason of all of them being covered with pieces of cloth—once white, but now dirty gray, as if they had been soiled with clammy hands for weeks or months. Nor were these signs, though unmistakeable to even the neophyte, all that there spoke with a terrible eloquence of man’s lowly destiny upon earth; ay, and of man’s pride too, even that pride of science which makes such a fool of him in the very midst of the evidences of his corruption; for although the windows were opened a little way, the choking air, thick with gases which, in other circumstances, the free wind carries off to dissipate and purify in the storm, pressed heavily upon the lungs, so that even the uninitiated shrank with unfeigned feeling, as if he shuddered under an awe that was perfectly foreign to his rough nature.

“Sure, and I’m among the dead,” said the man, whom the reader will have discovered to be an Irishman; “and I have something ov that kind to——”

“Sell,” added one assistant sharply, as, in his scientific ardour, he anticipated the merchant.

“Yes.”

And now the bashful man was relieved of his burden of shame, light or heavy as you please; but we verily say of some weight, as we have him at the beginning of a career which made the world ring till the echoes might have disturbed the gods, and we know that he was not otherwise without feelings pertaining to humanity; nay, we know, and shall tell, that on ONE occasion pity suffused an eye that was destined to be oftener and longer red with the fires of cruelty than was ever before in the world’s history the orb of a human being.

“And what do you give for wun?” he whispered, as he sidled up to the ear of the young anatomist who had been speaking to him.

“Sometimes as high as £10.”

And for certain, if the student had been curious enough to estimate the effect of such words upon such a man, to whom “ten pennies” would have been words of inspiration, he would have seen in that eye, no longer dull and muddy, the first access of that demon mammon, as by the touch upon the heart it raised the first pulses of a fever which was to grow and grow, till it dried up into a parched and senseless thing the fountain of pity; for, however inoperative, we are bound to say it was still there, as if abiding God’s judgments—and transform one nature altogether into another—for a purpose.

“And wouldn’t you give a pound more for a fresh wun?” said he, with that intoxication of hope which sometimes makes a beggar play with a new-born fortune.

“Sometimes more and sometimes less,” replied the other; “but ‘the thing’ must always be seen.”

“And by my sowl it is a good thing, and worth the money any how.”

“Where is it?”

“At home.”

“Then if you will bring it here about ten it will be examined, and you will get your money; and since you are a beginner, I may tell you, you had better bring it in a box.”

“And have we not a tea-chest all ready, which howlds it nate, and will not my friend help me to bring it?”

“Well, mind the hour, and be upon your guard that no one sees you.”

And so the man, however much an adult in the common immorality of the world, in this singular crime as yet an infant, left to complete his sale of merchandise. It would not be easy to figure his thoughts,—perhaps more difficult to estimate his feelings,—yet it might be for good that we could analyse these states of the mind, which are nought other than diseases, that we might apply the cure which God has vouchsafed to our keeping; even as that student strove to inquire into the secrets of the body, that he might learn how to deal with the living frame when it is out of order, or, perhaps, hastening to a premature dissolution.

That man was William Burke, and we say this as a historian might have said, that man was Alexander of Macedon, or that Julius Caesar, or that Napoleon—all equally great, or at least great with the difference that the first as yet only desecrated the temple for money, and the others took from it the deity for ambition. Ay, and with this difference also, which time was to shew, that while there have been many slaughtering kings, there never was but one William Burke.

Intercalary.

The ardour of the study of anatomy was in the youth, and it was there from sympathy; yea, for years before, the Square and the College had been under the fervour of competition. Nor was this fervour limited to the Scottish metropolis, from which the fame of the successive Monroes had gone forth over the world. There had arisen Barclay, who, as an extra-academical lecturer, had the faculty of inspiring his students with all the zeal which he himself possessed, and to his class in the Square there had come students from England and Ireland, as well as foreign parts. Even in prior times, when the teaching was almost limited to the college, the reputation of the professors had so accumulated élèves that Scotland groaned, and groaned ineffectually, under the invasion of her sacred graveyards. The country teemed with stories, in which there figured the midnight adventures of those strange men who gained a living by supplying, at all hazards, what was so peremptorily required in the scientific hall and its adjacent rooms.[1] Anxious mourners visited by the light of the moon the places where their dear relatives lay entombed, as if they could thereby satisfy themselves that the beloved bodies still rested there in peace, though it was certain that the artists became in a short time so proficient in their work that they could leave a grave apparently as entire as it was at the time when the mourners deposited their burden. That these adventures should have taken strange and sometimes grimly-ludicrous turns might have been expected, and yet it is more true that they transcended belief.

There was one long current in Leven in Fife of a character more like fiction than truth. A middle-aged man of the name of Henderson had died of an acute fever, and was buried in due time. He left a widow and daughter, and we need not speak, even to those who have not experienced such privation, of the deep valley of grief through which it takes so long a time for the light of a living hope to penetrate, if, in some instances, it ever penetrates at all. Yet people must live, and the widow was to keep the small public-house in the skirts of the town which her husband had conducted. Six days had passed since the funeral, when one night, at a late hour, two men asked and got admittance for the purpose of refreshment, one of them, according to their statement, having been taken ill. They were introduced through a dark lobby into a room, where there was one of those close beds so common in Scotland, and left there with the drink they had ordered. By and by a loud knock came to the door, and the voice of an officer demanded to know if some thieves who had broken into a neighbouring house had there taken refuge. The noise and the impending search had reached the ears of the two men who had entered shortly before, and having had