rties, instead of practical
jokes, and boisterous mirth, and talk of boats, and bats, and
guns, and horses, the highest and deepest questions of morals,
and politics, and metaphysics, were discussed, and discussed with
a. freshness and enthusiasm which is apt to wear off when doing
has to take the place of talking, but has a strange charm of its
own while it lasts, and is looked back to with loving regret by
those for whom it is no longer a possibility.

With this set Tom soon fraternized, and drank in many new ideas,
and took to himself also many new crotchets besides those with
which he was already weighted. Almost all his new acquaintances
were Liberal in politics, but a few only were ready to go all
lengths with him. They were all Union men, and Tom, of course,
followed the fashion, and soon propounded theories in that
institution which gained him the name of Chartist Brown.

There was a strong mixture of self-conceit in it all. He had a
kind of idea that he had discovered something which it was
creditable to have discovered, and that it was a very fine thing
to have all these feelings for, and sympathies with, "the
masses", and to believe in democracy, and "glorious humanity,"
and "a good time coming," and I know not what other big matters.
And, although it startled and pained him at first to hear himself
called ugly names, which he had hated and despised from his youth
up, and to know that many of his old acquaintances looked upon
him, not simply as a madman, but as a madman with snobbish
proclivities; yet, when the first plunge was over, there was a
good deal on the other hand which tickled his vanity, and was far
from being unpleasant.

To do him justice, however, the disagreeables were such that, had
there not been some genuine belief at the bottom, he would
certainly have been headed back very speedily into the fold of
political and social orthodoxy. As it was, amidst the cloud of
sophisms, and platitudes, and big, one-sided ideas half-mastered,
which filled his thoughts and overflowed in his talk, there was
growing in him, and taking firmer hold on him daily, a true and
broad sympathy for men as men, and especially for poor men as
poor men, and a righteous and burning hatred against all laws,
customs, or notions, which, according to his light, either were
or seemed to be setting aside, or putting anything else in the
place of, or above, the man. It was with him the natural
outgrowth of the child's and b