him. But such a one is a _lapsus naturae_. He has been born
without the proper attributes of youth, or at any rate, brought
up so as to have got rid of them.

Such, a one, at any rate, Charley Tudor was not. He was a little
shocked at first by the language he heard; but that feeling soon
wore off. His kind heart, also, in the first month of his
novitiate, sympathized with the daily miseries of Mr. Snape; but
he also soon learnt to believe that Mr. Snape was a counterfeit,
and after the first half year could torture him with as much
gusto as any of his brethren. Alas! no evil tendency communicates
itself among young men more quickly than cruelty. Those infernal
navvies were very cruel to Mr. Snape.

And yet young Tudor was a lad of a kindly heart, of a free,
honest, open disposition, deficient in no proportion of mind
necessary to make an estimable man. But he was easily malleable,
and he took at once the full impression of the stamp to which he
was subjected. Had he gone into the Weights and Measures, a
hypothesis which of course presumes a total prostration of the
intellects and energy of Mr. Hardlines, he would have worked
without a groan from ten till five, and have become as good a
model as the best of them. As it was, he can be hardly said to
have worked at all, soon became _facile princeps_ in the list of
habitual idlers, and was usually threatened once a quarter with
dismissal, even from that abode of idleness, in which the very
nature of true work was unknown.

Some tidings of Charley's doings in London, and non-doings at the
Internal Navigation, of course found their way to the Shropshire