o, Austin drew a picture of Tom
in prison, and repeated Tom's volunteer statement. The picture, though
his intentions were far from designing it so, had to Richard, whose
perception of humour was infinitely keener, a horrible chaw-bacon smack
about it. Visions of a grinning lout, open from ear to ear, unkempt,
coarse, splay-footed, rose before him and afflicted him with the
strangest sensations of disgust and comicality, mixed up with pity
and remorse--a sort of twisted pathos. There lay Tom; hobnail Tom! a
bacon-munching, reckless, beer-swilling animal! and yet a man; a
dear brave human heart notwithstanding; capable of devotion and
unselfishness. The boy's better spirit was touched, and it kindled
his imagination to realize the abject figure of poor clodpole Tom, and
surround it with a halo of mournful light. His soul was alive. Feelings
he had never known streamed in upon him as from an ethereal casement,
an unwonted tenderness, an embracing humour, a consciousness of some
ineffable glory, an irradiation of the features of humanity. All this
was in the bosom of the boy, and through it all the vision of an actual
hob-nail Tom, coarse, unkempt, open from ear to ear; whose presence was
a finger of shame to him and an oppression of clodpole; yet toward whom
he felt just then a loving-kindness beyond what he felt for any living
creature. He laughed at him, and wept over him. He prized him, while
he shrank from him. It was a genial strife of the angel in him with
constituents less divine; but the angel was uppermost and led
the van--extinguished loathing, humanized laughter, transfigured
pride--pride that would persistently contemplate the corduroys of gaping
Tom, and cry to Richard, in the very tone of Adrian's ironic voice,
"Behold your benefactor!"

Austin sat by the boy, unaware of the sublimer tumult he had stirred.
Little of it was perceptible in Richard's countenance. The lines of
his mouth were slightly drawn; his eyes hard set into the distance. He
remained thus many minutes. Finally he jumped to his legs, saying, "I'll
go at once to old Blaize and tell him."

Austin grasped his hand, and together they issued out of Daphne's Bower,
in the direction of Lobourne.

CHAPTER VIII

Farmer Blaize was not so astonished at the visit of Richard Feverel
as that young gentleman expected him to be. The farmer, seated in
his easy-chair in the little low-roofed parlour of an old-fashioned
farm-house, with a long clay