picious manner, or a manner that would be better described as
one of lying in wait. There was a kind of settled trouble in the face.
It was the face belonging to a naturally slow or inattentive intellect
that had toiled hard to get what it had won, and that had to hold it now
that it was gotten. He always seemed to be uneasy lest anything should
be missing from his mental warehouse, and taking stock to assure
himself.

Suppression of so much to make room for so much, had given him a
constrained manner, over and above. Yet there was enough of what was
animal, and of what was fiery (though smouldering), still visible in
him, to suggest that if young Bradley Headstone, when a pauper lad, had
chanced to be told off for the sea, he would not have been the last man
in a ship's crew. Regarding that origin of his, he was proud, moody, and
sullen, desiring it to be forgotten. And few people knew of it.

In some visits to the Jumble his attention had been attracted to this
boy Hexam. An undeniable boy for a pupil-teacher; an undeniable boy
to do credit to the master who should bring him on. Combined with this
consideration, there may have been some thought of the pauper lad now
never to be mentioned. Be that how it might, he had with pains gradually
worked the boy into his own school, and procured him some offices to
discharge there, which were repaid with food and lodging. Such were the
circumstances that had brought together, Bradley Headstone and young
Charley Hexam that autumn evening. Autumn, because full half a year had
come and gone since the bird of prey lay dead upon the river-shore.

The schools--for they were twofold, as the sexes--were down in that
district of the flat country tending to the Thames, where Kent and
Surrey meet, and where the railways still bestride the market-gardens
that will soon die under them. The schools were newly built, and there
were so many like them all over the country, that one might have thought
the whole were but one restless edifice with the locomotive gift of
Aladdin's palace. They were in a neighbourhood which looked like a toy
neighbourhood taken in blocks out of a box by a child of particularly
incoherent mind, and set up anyhow; here, one side of a new street;
there, a large solitary public-house facing nowhere; here, another
unfinished street already in ruins; there, a church; here, an immense
new warehouse; there, a dilapidated old country villa; then, a medley
of black ditch, s