to look over. There; get back to
your rooms, and do what I tell you, or sit down here and hold
your tongue."

So Tom sat down and held his tongue, and was soon deep in
Carlyle's "Past and Present." How he did revel in it--in the
humor, the power, the pathos, but, above all, in the root and
branch denunciations of many of the doctrines in which he had
been so lately voluntarily and wearily chaining himself! The
chains went snapping off one after another, and, in his
exultation, he kept spouting out passage after passage in a song
of triumph, "Enlightened egoism never so luminous is not the rule
by which man's life can be led--_laissez-faire_, supply and
demand, cash payment for the sole nexus, and so forth, were not,
are not, and never will be, a practical law of union for a
society of men," &c., &c., until Hardy fairly got up and turned
him out, and he retired with his new-found treasure to his own
rooms.

He had scarcely ever in his life been so moved by a book before.
He laughed over it, and cried over it, and began half a dozen
letters to the author to thank him, which he fortunately tore up.
He almost forgot Mary for several hours during his first
enthusiasm. He had no notion how he had been mastered and
oppressed before. He felt as the crew of a small fishing-smack,
who are being towed away by an enemy's cruiser, might feel on
seeing a frigate with the Union Jack flying, bearing down and
opening fire on their captor; or as a small boy at school, who is
being fagged against rules by the right of the strongest, feels
when he sees his big brother coming around the corner. The help
which he had found was just what he wanted. There was no
narrowing of the ground here--no appeal to men as members of any
exclusive body whatever to separate themselves and come out of
the devil's world; but to men as men, to every man as a man--to
the weakest and meanest, as well as to the strongest and most
noble--telling them that the world is God's world, that everyone
of them has a work in it, and bidding them find their work and
set about it.

The strong tinge of sadness which ran through the whole book, and
its unsparing denunciations of the established order of things,
suited his own unsettled and restless frame of mind. So he gave
himself up to his new bondage, and rejoiced in it, as though he
had found at last what he was seeking for; and, by the time that
long vacation came round again, to which we are compelled to
hurry h