TOM BROWN'S
open carriage, with Arthur propped up with pillows in it, looking already better, Tom thought.
They jumped up onto the steps to shake hands with him, and Tom mumbled thanks for the presents he had found in his study, and looked round anxiously for Arthur's mother.
East, who had fallen back into his usual humor, looked quaintly at Arthur, and said:
"So you've been at it again, through that hot-headed convert of yours there. He's been making our lives a burthen to us all the morning about using cribs. I shall get floored to a certainty at second lesson if I'm called up."
Arthur blushed and looked down. Tom struck in:
"Oh, it's all right. He's converted already; he always comes through the mud after us, grumbling and sputtering."
The clock struck, and they had to go off to school, wishing Arthur a pleasant holiday; Tom lingering behind a moment to send his thanks and love to Arthur's mother.
Tom renewed the discussion after second lesson, and succeeded so far as to get East to promise to give the new plan a fair trial.
Encouraged by his success, in the evening, when they were sitting alone in the large study, where East lived now almost, "vice Arthur on leave," after examining the new fishing-rod, which both pronounced to be the genuine article ("play enough to throw a midge tied on a single hair against the wind, and strength enough to hold a grampus"), they naturally began talking about Arthur. Tom, who was still bubbling over with last night's scene, and all the thoughts of the last week, and wanting to clinch and fix the whole in his own mind, which he could never do without first going through the process of belaboring somebody else with it all, suddenly rushed into the subject of Arthur's illness and what he had said about death.
East had given him the desired opening; after a serio-comic grumble "that life wasn't worth having now they were tied to a young beggar who was always 'raising his standard'; and that he,
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