in his character it must be the business of the tale to show.

The other young clerk in this office to whom we alluded is Alaric
Tudor. He is a year older than Henry Norman, though he began his
official career a year later, and therefore at the age of twenty-
one. How it happened that he contrived to pass the scrutinizing
instinct and deep powers of examination possessed by the chief
clerk, was a great wonder to his friends, though apparently none
at all to himself. He took the whole proceeding very easily;
while another youth alongside of him, who for a year had been
reading up for his promised nomination, was so awe-struck by the
severity of the proceedings as to lose his powers of memory and
forget the very essence of the differential calculus.

Of hydraulic pressure and the differential calculus young Tudor
knew nothing, and pretended to know nothing. He told the chief
clerk that he was utterly ignorant of all such matters, that his
only acquirements were a tolerably correct knowledge of English,
French, and German, with a smattering of Latin and Greek, and
such an intimacy with the ordinary rules of arithmetic and with
the first books of Euclid, as he had been able to pick up while
acting as a tutor, rather than a scholar, in a small German
university.

The chief clerk raised his eyebrows and said he feared it would
not do. A clerk, however, was wanting. It was very clear that the
young gentleman who had only showed that he had forgotten his
conic sections could not be supposed to have passed. The
austerity of the last few years had deterred more young men from
coming forward than the extra L10 had induced to do so. One