Toms `First Half
TOM TULLIVERS sufferings during the first quarter he was at Kings Lorton uhe distinguished care of the Rev. Walter Stelling were rather severe. At Mr Jacobs Academy, life had not preseself to him as a difficult problem: there were plenty of fellows to play with, and Tom being good at all active games, fighting especially, had that prece among them which appeared to him inseparable from the personality of Tom Tulliver; Mr Jacobs himself, familiarly known as Old Goggles, from his habit of wearing spectacles, imposed no painful awe; and if it was the property of snuffy old hypocrites like him to write like copperplate and surround their signatures with arabesques, to spell without forethought, and to spout `My name is Norval without bungling, Tom for his part was rather glad he was not in danger of those mean aplishments. He was not going to be a snuffy saster - he; but a substantial man, like his father, who used to go hunting when he was younger, and rode a capital black mare - as pretty a bit of horse-flesh as ever you saw: Tom had heard what her points were a huimes. He meant to go hunting too, and to be generally respected. When people were grown up, he sidered, nobody inquired about their writing and spelling: when he was a man, he should be master of everything and do just as he liked. It had been very difficult for him to recile himself to the idea that his school-time was to be prolonged, and that he was not to be brought up to his fathers business, which he had always thought extremely pleasant, for it was nothing but riding about, giving orders, and going to market; ahought that a clergyman would give him a great many Scripture lessons, and probably make him learn the Gospel ale on a Sunday as well as the Collect. But in the absence of specififormation, it was impossible for him to imagihat school and a saster would be somethiirely different from the Academy and Mr Jacobs. So, not to be at a deficy, in case of his finding genial panions, he had taken care to carry with him a small box of percussion caps; not that there was anything particular to be doh them, but they would serve to impress strange boys with a sense of his familiarity with guns. Thus poor Tom, though he saw very clearly through Maggies illusions, was not without illusions of his own, which were to be cruelly dissipated by his enlarged experie Kings Lorton. He had not been there a fht before it was evident to him that life, plicated not only with the Latin grammar but with a andard of English pronunciation, was a very difficult business, made all the more obscure by a thick mist of bashfulness. Tom, as you have observed, was never an exception among boys for ease of address; but the difficulty of enunciating a monosyllable in reply to Mr or Mrs Stelling was so great, that he even dreaded to be asked at table whether he would have more pudding. As to the percussion caps, he had almost resolved, iterness of his heart that he would throw them into a neighb pond: for not only was he the solitary pupil, but he begao have a certaiicism about guns, and a general sehat his theory of life was undermined. For Mr Stelling thought nothing of guns, or horses either, apparently; a was impossible for Tom to despise Mr Stelling as he had despised Old Goggles. If there were anything that was not thhly genuine about Mr Stelling, it lay quite beyond Toms power to detect it: it is only by a wide parison of facts that the wisest full-grown man distinguish w