able--and therefore it
behoves me not to dwell unduly on times and scenes in which I was not
personally interested.

I had a very close connection with the events that rendered Charlie's
first term at school so exciting, but after that, for three years, I
pursued the even tenor of my way, performing some twenty-six thousand
two hundred and eighty revolutions, unmarked by any incident, either in
my own life or that of my master worthy of notice.

By the end of those three years, however, things were greatly changed at
Randlebury. Charlie, not far from his sixteenth birthday, was now a
tall, broad-shouldered fellow, lording it in the Upper Fifth, and the
hero of the cricket field of which he himself had once been a cadet. In
face he was not greatly altered. Still the old curly head and bright
eyes. He _was_ noticed occasionally to stroke his chin abstractedly;
and some envious detractors went so far as to rumour that, in the lowest
recesses of his trunk he had a razor, wherewith on divers occasions, in
dread secret, he operated with slashing effect. Be this as it might,
Charlie was growing up. He had a fag of his own, who alternately quaked
and rejoiced beneath his eye; he wore a fearful and wonderful stick-up
collar on Sundays, and, above all, he treated me with a careless
indifference which contrasted wonderfully with his former enthusiasm,
and betokened only too significantly the advance of years on his young
head.

True, he wound me up regularly; but he often left me half the day under
his pillow; and though once in a fit of artistic zeal he set himself to
hew out a C.N. in startling characters on my back, with the point of a
bodkin, he never polished me now as he was once wont to do.

All this was painful to me, especially the operation with the bodkin,
but I still rejoiced to call him master, and to know that though years
had changed his looks, and sobered his childish exuberance, the same
true heart still beat close to mine, and remained still as warm and
guileless as when little Charlie Newcome, with me in his pocket, first
put his foot forth into the world.

There were two besides myself who could bear witness at the end of these
three years that time had not changed the boy's heart. These two, I
need hardly say, were Tom Drift and Jim Halliday.

To Tom, Charlie had become increasingly a friend of the true kind. Ever
since the day at Gurley races, the influence of the younger boy had
grown and over