With the beginning of the new year these delicious hours of leisure disappeared. Edwin and his friends, with the assurance of second-year men, became the real possessors of the dissecting room. Anatomy and physiology now absorbed all their time, and the leisurely interest in the first subject, which had been subsidiary in the first year, was now a matter of academical life and death. From the simple anatomical details of the upper and lower extremities that he had dissected with Martin in the year before, he passed to the more vital regions of the human body: the thorax, the abdomen, and the head and neck. He still attended the polished course of lectures on anatomy that the Dean delivered in the theatre; but this process he was forced to regard as a waste of time, since the Dean’s presentation of the subject did not differ greatly from that of any text-book of anatomy, and the Dean’s personality, which curiously resembled that of his cousin Martin, was too aristocratically remote ever to seem real. In the dissecting room, on the other hand, he became acquainted and fascinated with the first of his medical instructors who had aroused his imagination. This was the chief demonstrator of Anatomy, Robert Moon, or, more familiarly, Bobby, a figure of romantic picturesqueness. He was tall and inclined to be fat, he always wore a black frock-coat, and his serious face, which was of a size and pallor that his surname suggested, was crowned by an erect crop of black and curly hair. In Edwin’s first year he had always seemed to him a strange and distant figure, walking slowly up and down the dissecting room, on the occasions when he emerged from the dark chamber which he inhabited in the corner near the door, like a fat and rather sinister spider. He rarely spoke: when he did so it was with a broad, north country accent and the most extraordinary deliberation and formality in his choice of words. With the men in the second year he possessed an enormous reputation not only for his exhaustive knowledge of anatomy, by the side of which the Dean’s attainments seemed merely those of a dilettante, but also for his excellence as a coach. Edwin and his two friends became sedulous attendants at his tutorials, where, standing in immobile dignity behind one of the zinc dissecting-room tables in front of an appropriate background of blackboard, and surrounded by a ring of second-year students, who came to sit at his feet voluntarily, like the disciples of a Greek philosopher, he would demonstrate the details of some ragged anatomical part that had lain in spirit until it was of the colour and consistency of leather.