ng
whom was a silly young fellow, who had mistaken his proper
calling--(he should have been a wood-chopper), and was suffering
under an attack _at_ medicine. The question for debate on one
occasion was--Is conscience an infallible guide? Being expected
to take part in the discussion, he was bent on thorough
preparation, and ransacked his preceptor's professional
library--(almost as poor a place as a lawyer's) for a work on
_conscience_. He found abundance of matter, however, for a
lengthy chapter on the subject, as he supposed, occurring in
several of the dusty octavos, and he thumbed the leaves with
most patient assiduity. He had misspelled the word however, and
was reading all the while on _consciousness_--a subject which
would very naturally occur in some departments of medicine. But
it was all one to him, he didn't see the difference, and the
ridiculous display he made to us of his 'cramming' on
consciousness can be better imagined than described.

Years after found me inside college walls--but colleges in the
West, be it remembered, sometimes include preparatory
departments, into which, by the courtesy of the teachers, many
young men are admitted who would hardly make a respectable
figure in the poorest country school, but who by dint of honest
toil finally do themselves great credit.

I 'happened in' on a number of such, one evening, whose
affinities had drawn them together with a view to forming a
debating society, to be made exclusively of their own kind. I
listened with much interest and pleasure to the preliminaries of
organization, and smiled, when they were about to 'choose a
question,' to see them bring out the same old coaches mentioned
in the beginning of this article; when one of their number
arose, evidently dissatisfied with the old beaten track, and
seemed bent on opening a new vein. He was a good, honest,
patient fellow, but his weakness in expressing himself was,
that, although his delivery was very slow, he didn't know how he
was going to end his sentences when he began them. 'Mr.
President,' said he, 'how would this do? Suppose a punkin seed
sprouts in one man's garden, and the vine grows through the
fence, and bears a punkin on another man's ground--now--(a long
pause)--the question is--whose punkin--_does it belong to?_' The
poor fellow s