oy's training (though his father
would have been much astonished to be told so), and the instincts
of those early days were now getting rapidly set into habits and
faiths, and becoming a part of himself.

In this stage of his life, as in so many former ones, Tom got
great help from his intercourse with Hardy, now the rising tutor
of the college. Hardy was travelling much the same road himself
as our hero, but was somewhat further on, and had come into it
from a different country, and though quite other obstacles. Their
early lives had been very different; and, both by nature and from
long and severe self-restraint and discipline, Hardy was much the
less impetuous and demonstrative of the two. He did not rush out,
therefore (as Tom was too much inclined to do), the moment he had
seized hold of the end of a new idea which he felt to be good for
_him_ and what _he_ wanted, and brandish it in the face of all
comers, and think himself a traitor to the truth if he wasn't
trying to make everybody he met with eat it. Hardy, on the
contrary, would test his new idea, and turn it over, and prove it
as far as he could, and try to get hold of the whole of it, and
ruthlessly strip off any tinsel or rose-pink sentiment with which
it might happen to be mixed up.

Often and often did Tom suffer under this severe method, and
rebel against it, and accuse his friend, both to his face and in
his own secret thoughts, of coldness, and want of faith, and all
manner of other sins of omission and commission. In the end,
however, he generally came round, with more or less of rebellion,
according to the severity of the treatment, and acknowledge that,
when Hardy brought him down from riding the high horse, it was
not without good reason, and that the dust in which he was rolled
was always most wholesome dust.

For instance, there was no phrase more frequently in the mouths
of the party of progress than "the good cause." It was a fine
big-sounding phrase, which could be used with great effect in
perorations of speeches at the Union, and was sufficiently
indefinite to be easily defended from ordinary attacks, while it
saved him who used it the trouble of ascertaining accurately for
himself, or settling for his hearers, what it really did mean.
But, however satisfactory it might be before promiscuous
audiences, and so long as vehement assertion or declaration was
all that was required to uphold it, this same "good cause" was
liable to come to m