body," remarked the stranger.

"We medicals have a better way than that," said Fettes. "When we dislike
a dead friend of ours, we dissect him."

Macfarlane looked up sharply, as though this jest were scarcely to his
mind.

The afternoon passed. Gray, for that was the stranger's name, invited
Fettes to join them at dinner, ordered a feast so sumptuous that the
tavern was thrown into commotion, and when all was done commanded
Macfarlane to settle the bill. It was late before they separated; the
man Gray was incapably drunk. Macfarlane, sobered by his fury, chewed
the cud of the money he had been forced to squander and the slights he
had been obliged to swallow. Fettes, with various liquors singing in his
head, returned home with devious footsteps and a mind entirely in
abeyance. Next day Macfarlane was absent from the class, and Fettes
smiled to himself as he imagined him still squiring the intolerable Gray
from tavern to tavern. As soon as the hour of liberty had struck he
posted from place to place in quest of his last night's companions. He
could find them, however, nowhere; so returned early to his rooms, went
early to bed, and slept the sleep of the just.

At four in the morning he was awakened by the well-known signal.
Descending to the door, he was filled with astonishment to find
Macfarlane with his gig, and in the gig one of those long and ghastly
packages with which he was so well acquainted.

"What?" he cried. "Have you been out alone? How did you manage?"

But Macfarlane silenced him roughly, bidding him turn to business. When
they had got the body upstairs and laid it on the table, Macfarlane made
at first as if he were going away. Then he paused and seemed to
hesitate; and then, "You had better look at the face," said he, in tones
of some constraint. "You had better," he repeated, as Fettes only stared
at him in wonder.

"But where, and how, and when did you come by it?" cried the other.

"Look at the face," was the only answer.

Fettes was staggered; strange doubts assailed him. He looked from the
young doctor to the body, and then back again. At last, with a start, he
did as he was bidden. He had almost expected the sight that met his
eyes, and yet the shock was cruel. To see, fixed in the rigidity of
death and naked on that coarse layer of sackcloth, the man whom he had
left well clad and full of meat and sin upon the threshold of a tavern,
awoke, even in the thoughtless Fettes, some of the terr