son in and do for him'; and Mrs. Richards, as her first
compliance with these requests, had kept the latch-key in her own
pocket. So matters went on for a week; but when Mrs. Richards
found that her maidservant was never woken by Mr. Charley's raps
after midnight, and that she herself was obliged to descend in
her dressing-gown, she changed her mind, declared to herself that
it was useless to attempt to keep a grown gentleman in leading-
strings, and put the key on the table on the second Monday
morning.

As none of the three men ever dined at home, Alaric and Norman
having clubs which they frequented, and Charley eating his dinner
at some neighbouring dining-house, it may be imagined that this
change of residence did our poor navvy but little good. It had,
however, a salutary effect on him, at any rate at first. He
became shamed into a quieter and perhaps cleaner mode of dressing
himself; he constrained himself to sit down to breakfast with his
monitors at half-past eight, and was at any rate so far regardful
of Mrs. Richards as not to smoke in his bedroom, and to come home
sober enough to walk upstairs without assistance every night for
the first month.

But perhaps the most salutary effect made by this change on young
Tudor was this, that he was taken by his cousin one Sunday to the
Woodwards. Poor Charley had had but small opportunity of learning
what are the pleasures of decent society. He had gone headlong
among the infernal navvies too quickly to allow of that slow and
gradual formation of decent alliances which is all in all to a
young man entering life. A boy is turned loose into London, and
desired to choose the good and eschew the bad. Boy as he is, he