Page:Tom Brown's School Days (6th ed).djvu/392

 thoughtfulness. And I can assure you he has watched the experiment ever since with great satisfaction. Ah! not one of you boys will ever know the anxiety you have given him, or the care with which he has watched over every step in your school lives."

Up to this time Tom had never wholly given in to or understood the Doctor. At first he had thoroughly feared him. For some years, as I have tried to show, he had learned to regard him with love and respect, and to think him a very great and wise and good man. But, as regarded his own position in the school, of which he was no little proud, Tom had no idea of giving any one credit for it but himself; and, truth to tell, was a very self-conceited young gentleman on the subject. He was wont to boast that he had fought his own way fairly up the school, and had never made up to, or been taken up by, any big fellow or master, and that it was now quite a different place from what it was when he first came. And, indeed, though he didn't actually boast of it, yet in his secret soul he did to a great extent believe that the great reform in the school had been owing quite as much to himself as to any one else. Arthur, he acknowledged, had done him good, and taught him a good deal; so had other boys in different ways, but they had not had the same means of influence on the school in general; and as for the Doctor, why, he was a splendid master, but every one knew that masters could do very little out of school hours. In short, he felt on terms of equality with his chief, so far as the social state of the school was concerned, and thought that the Doctor would find it no easy matter to get on without him. Moreover, his school Toryism was still strong, and he looked still with some jealousy on the Doctor as somewhat of a fanatic in the matter of change; and thought it very desirable for the school that he should have some wise person (such as himself) to look sharply after vested school-rights and see that nothing was done to the injury of the republic without due protest. It was a new light to him to find that, besides teaching the sixth