n earns his bread, Ricky. You poached on his grounds. He turned
you off, and you fired his rick."

"And I'll pay him for his loss. And I won't do any more."

"Because you won't ask a favour of him?"

"No! I will not ask a favour of him."

Austin looked at the boy steadily. "You prefer to receive a favour from
poor Tom Bakewell?"

At Austin's enunciation of this obverse view of the matter Richard raised
his brow. Dimly a new light broke in upon him. "Favour from Tom Bakewell,
the ploughman? How do you mean, Austin?"

"To save yourself an unpleasantness you permit a country lad to sacrifice
himself for you? I confess I should not have so much pride."

"Pride!" shouted Richard, stung by the taunt, and set his sight hard at
the blue ridges of the hills.

Not knowing for the moment what else to do, 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
con