every minute, and became real to him. Why a few men
should be rich, and all the rest poor; above all, why he should
be one of the few? Why the mere possession of property should
give a man power over all his neighbors? Why poor men who were
ready and willing to work should only be allowed to work as a
sort of favor, and should after all get the merest tithe of what
their labor produced, and be tossed aside as soon as their work
was done, or no longer required? These, and other such problems,
rose up before him, crude and sharp, asking to be solved. Feeling
himself quite unable to give any but one answer to them--viz.
that he was getting out of his depth, and that the whole business
was in a muddle--he had recourse to his old method when in
difficulties, and putting on his cap, started off to Hardy's
rooms to talk the matter over, and see whether he could not get
some light on it from that quarter.

He returned in an hour or so, somewhat less troubled in his mind
inasmuch as he had found his friend in pretty much the same state
of mind on such topics as himself. But one step he had gained.
Under his arm he carried certain books from Hardy's scanty
library, the perusal of which he hoped, at least, might enable
him sooner or later to feel that he had got on to some sort of
firm ground, At any rate, Hardy had advised him to read them; so,
without more ado, he drew his chair to the table and began to
look into them.

This glimpse of the manner in which Tom spent the first evening
of his second year at Oxford, will enable intelligent readers to
understand why, though he took to reading far more kindly and
honestly than he had ever done before, he made no great advance
in the proper studies of the place. Not that he wholly neglected
these, for Hardy kept him pretty well up to the collar, and he
passed his little go creditably, and was fairly placed at the
college examinations. In some of the books which he had to get up
for lectures he was genuinely interested. The politics of Athens,
the struggle between the Roman plebs and patricians, Mons Sacer
and the Agrarian laws--these began to have a new meaning to him,
but chiefly because they bore more or less on the great Harry
Winburn problem; which problem, indeed, for him had now fairly
swelled into the condition-of-England problem, and was becoming
every day more and more urgent and importunate, shaking many old
beliefs, and leading him whither he knew not.

This very matt