His three months in the casualty department passed away quickly, and in the spring of the year he found himself attached as dresser to that startling surgeon, Lloyd Moore. The appointment, as he soon realised, was a privilege; for Lloyd Moore was the one man of unquestionable genius in the North Bromwich Medical School. At first the experience was rather alarming, for the vagaries of his chief, and, not least, his genial vulgarity, seemed at first as though they were going to destroy the pretty edifice of ideals that Edwin had constructed on the basis of the Hippocratic oath and his experience in the casualty department. Lloyd Moore, to begin with, was no respecter of persons, ancient or modern; his wit was ruthless and occasionally bitter, as Edwin had reason to know; his language, particularly in moments of stress, was unvarnished and foul, even in the presence of women. On the surface, indeed, he seemed a person whom Hippocrates would have regarded as undignified and improper. Sometimes in the out-patient department Edwin would blush for his chief’s violence and cruelty, but, in the end, all these things were forgotten in the realisation that the little man was a great surgical genius, to whom diagnosis was a matter of inspired, unerring instinct, and practice a gift of the gods. Nor were his virtues merely professional. L.M. (as he was always called) was a man of the people, one who had fought his way inch by inch into the honourable position that he held as the greatest of surgeons and the wealthiest practitioner in the Midlands. The unpaid work of the hospital absorbed him even to the neglect of private practice, and every doctor in the district knew that he could count on the very best of the great man’s skill for a nominal fee in any case of emergency. Far more than any consultant in the Midlands, he was regarded as the general practitioner’s friend, and, as a result of this confidence, all the most interesting surgical material of the district found its way into his clinic. In a little time Edwin became wholly subject to the spell of this amazing personality, until it seemed strange to him that he could ever have doubted the propriety of anything that L.M. said or did. He wondered more and more at the man’s titanic energy, for Lloyd Moore was a little fellow, so pale that he always looked as if he were fainting with exhaustion. His patients also adored him, and more than once Edwin was told in the wards by elderly female admirers that Mr. Lloyd Moore was the very image of Jesus Christ.