the smell. I don't notice it myself."

He asked Philip's name and looked at a list on the board.

"You've got a leg--number four."

Philip saw that another name was bracketed with his own.

"What's the meaning of that?" he asked.

"We're very short of bodies just now. We've had to put two on each part."

The dissecting-room was a large apartment painted like the corridors, the
upper part a rich salmon and the dado a dark terra-cotta. At regular
intervals down the long sides of the room, at right angles with the wall,
were iron slabs, grooved like meat-dishes; and on each lay a body. Most of
them were men. They were very dark from the preservative in which they had
been kept, and the skin had almost the look of leather. They were
extremely emaciated. The attendant took Philip up to one of the slabs. A
youth was standing by it.

"Is your name Carey?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Oh, then we've got this leg together. It's lucky it's a man, isn't it?"

"Why?" asked Philip.

"They generally always like a male better," said the attendant. "A
female's liable to have a lot of fat about her."

Philip looked at the body. The arms and legs were so thin that there was
no shape in them, and the ribs stood out so that the skin over them was
tense. A man of about forty-five with a thin, gray beard, and on his skull
scanty, colourless hair: the eyes were closed and the lower jaw sunken.
Philip could not feel that this had ever been a man, and yet in the row of
them there was something terrible and ghastly.

"I thought I'd start at two," said the young man who was dissecting with
Philip.

"All right, I'll be here then."

He had bought the day before the case of instruments which was needful,
and now he was given a locker. He looked at the boy who had accompanied
him into the dissecting-room and saw that he was white.

"Make you feel rotten?" Philip asked him.

"I've never seen anyone dead before."

They walked along the corridor till they came to the entrance of the
school. Philip remembered Fanny Price. She was the first dead person he
had ever seen, and he remembered how strangely it had affected him. There
was an immeasurable distance between the quick and the dead: they did not
seem to belong to the same species; and it was strange to think that but
a little while before they had spoken and moved and eaten and laughed.
There was something horrible about the dead, and you could imagine that
they might cast an evil influ