exercised his own
personal influence, but just quietly went on his own way, and let
other men go theirs. Another of his beliefs was, that there was
no man or thing in the world too bad to be tolerated; faithfully
acting up to which belief, the Captain himself tolerated persons
and things intolerable.

Bearing which facts in mind, the reader will easily guess the
result of the application which the crew duly made to him the day
after Miller's back was turned. He simply said that the training
they proposed would not be enough, and that he himself should
take all who chose to go down, to Abingdon twice a week. From
that time there were many defaulters; and the spirit of Diogenes
groaned within him, as day after day the crew had to be filled up
from the torpid or by watermen. Drysdale would ride down to
Sandford, meeting the boat on its way up, and then take his place
for the pull up to Oxford, while his groom rode his horse up to
Folly bridge to meet him. There he would mount again and ride off
to Bullingdon, or to the Isis, or Quentin, or other social
meeting equally inimical to good training. Blake often absented
himself three days in a week, and other men once or twice.

From considering which facts, Tom came to understand the
difference between his two heroes; their strong likeness in many
points he had seen from the first. They were alike in
truthfulness, bravery, bodily strength, and in most of their
opinions. But Jervis worried himself about nothing, and let all
men and things alone, in the belief that the world was not going
so very wrong, or would right itself somehow without him. Hardy,
on the other hand, was consuming his heart over everything that
seemed to him to be going wrong in himself and round about
him--in the college, in Oxford, in England, in the ends of the
earth, and never letting slip a chance of trying to set right,
here a thread, and there a thread. A self-questioning, much
enduring man; a slayer of dragons himself, and one with whom you
could not live much without getting uncomfortably aware of the
dragons which you also had to slay.

What wonder that, apart altogether from the difference in their
social position, the one man was ever becoming more and more
popular, while the other was left more and more to himself. There
are few of us at Oxford, or elsewhere, who do not like to see a
man living a brave and righteous life, so long as he keeps clear
of us; and still fewer who _do_ like to be