and a raven with a bald head. He was all kindness to these prisoners,
fondled them with hands and voice, spoke a kind of inarticulate baby
language to them, and gave them pet names. He forgot his misery, his
poverty--I remember that he never had a handkerchief and always wanted
one, that his jacket-sleeves were near his elbow, and that his wrist
bones were red and broken. But now there shone a clear light in his
eye; he could face the world as he spoke to me of the habits of his
friends. We got upon some sort of terms by these means, and I always
had a kind of affection for poor R----d. In a sense we were both
outcasts, and might have warmed the world for each other. If I had not
been so entirely absorbed in my private life as to grudge any moment
of it unnecessarily spent I should have asked him home. But boys are
exorbitant in their own affairs, and I had no time to spare him.

I was a year at ---- before I got so far with any schoolfellow of mine
there; but just about the time of my visit to R----d I fell in with
another boy, called Harkness, who, for some reason of his own, desired
my closer acquaintance and got as much of it as I was able to give to
anybody, and a good deal more than he deserved or I was the better of.
He, too, was a day-boy, whose people lived in a suburb of the town
which lay upon my road. We scraped acquaintance by occasionally
travelling together so much of the way as he had to traverse; from
this point onward all the advances were his. I had no liking for him,
and, in fact, some of his customs shocked me. But he was older than I,
very friendly, and very interesting. He evidently liked me; he asked
me to tea with him; he used to wait for me, going and returning. I had
no means of refusing his acquaintance, and did not; but I got no good
out of him.

As he was older, so he was much more competent. Not so much vicious as