`The Young Idea
THE alternations of feeling in that first dialogue between Tom and Philip tio mark their intercourse even after many weeks of schoolboy intimacy. Tom never quite lost the feeling that Philip, being the son of a `rascal, was his natural enemy, hhly overcame his repulsion to Philips deformity: deformity: he was a boy who adhered tenaciously to impressions once received: as with all minds in which mere perception predominates over thought aion, the external remaio him rigidly what it was in the first instance. But then, it was impossible not to like Philips pany when he was in a good humour: he could help one so well in ones Latin exercises, whi regarded as a kind of puzzle that could only be found out be a lucky ce; and he could tell such wonderful fighting stories about Hal of the Wynd, for example, and other heroes who were especial favourites with Tom, because they laid about them with heavy strokes. He had small opinion of Saladin whose scimitar could cut a cushion in two in an instant: who wao cut cushions? That was a stupid story, and he didnt care to hear it again. But when Robert Bru the black pony rose in his stirrups and lifting his good battle-axe cracked at ohe helmet and the skull of the too-hasty knight at Bannockburn, then Tom felt all the exaltation of sympathy and if he had had a cout at hand, he would have cracked it at oh the poker. Philip in his happier moods, indulged Tom to the top of his bent, heightening the crash and bang and fury of every fight with all the artillery of epithets at his and. But he was not always in a good humour or happy mood. The slight spurt of peevish susceptibility which had escaped him in their first interview, was a symptom of a perpetually recurrial ailment - half of it nervous irritability, half of it the heart-bitterness produced by the sense of his deformity. In these fits of susceptibility every glance seemed to him to be charged either with offey or with ill-repressed disgust - at the very least it was an indifferent glance, and Philip felt indifference as a child of the south feels the chill air of a northern spring. Poor Toms blundering patronage when they were out of doors together would sometimes make him turn upon the well-meaning lad quite savagely, and his eyes, usually sad and quiet, would flash with anything but playful lightning. No woom retained his suspis of the humpback. But Philips self-taught skill in drawing was another liween them: for Tom found, to his disgust, that his new drawing-master gave him no dogs and doo draw, but brooks and rustic bridges and ruins all with a general softness of black-lead surfadig that nature, if anything, was rather satiny; and as Toms feeling for the picturesque in landscape resent quite latent, it is not surprising that Mr Goodrichs produs seemed to him an uing form of art. Mr Tulliver having a vague iion that Tom should be put to some business whicluded the drawing out of plans and maps, had plaio Mr Riley, when he saw him at Mudport, that Tom seemed to be learning nothing of that sort: whereupon that obliging adviser had suggested that Tom should have drawing lessons. Mr Tulliver must not mind payira for drawing: let Tom be made a gohtsman, and he would be able to turn his pencil to any purpose. So it was ordered that Tom should have drawing lessons; and whom should Mr Stelling have selected as a master if noodrich, who was sidered quite at the head of his profession within a circuit of twelve miles round Kin