Of which are you an admirer?"
"The last, as practiced by ourselves, for the other three are
destructive of all the opportunities for dissection; whereas, in the
last, the coffin can lie in peaceful decency, while the remains are made
to subserve the useful purposes of science. Ah! Captain Lawton, I enjoy
comparatively but few opportunities of such a nature, to what I expected
on entering the army."
"To what may these pleasures numerically amount in a year?" said the
captain, withdrawing his gaze from the graveyard.
"Within a dozen, upon my honor; my best picking is when the corps is
detached; for when we are with the main army, there are so many boys to
be satisfied, that I seldom get a good subject. Those youngsters are as
wasteful as prodigals, and as greedy as vultures."
"A dozen!" echoed the trooper, in surprise. "Why, I furnish you that
number with my own hands."
"Ah! Jack," returned the doctor, approaching the subject with great
tenderness of manner, "it is seldom I can do anything with your
patients; you disfigure them woefully. Believe me, John, when I tell you
as a friend that your system is all wrong; you unnecessarily destroy
life, and then you injure the body so that it is unfit for the only use
that can be made of a dead man."
The trooper maintained a silence, which he thought would be the most
probable means of preserving peace between them; and the surgeon,
turning his head from taking a last look at the burial, as they rode
around the foot of the hill that shut the valley from their sight,
continued with a suppressed sigh,--
"One might get a natural death from that graveyard to-night, if there
was but time and opportunity! The patient must be the father of the lady
we saw this morning.
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