prompt:
Chapter: The Christmas Holidays

Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his
duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts
of warmth and color with all the heightening contrast of frost and
snow.

Snow lay on the croft and river-bank in undulations softer than the
limbs of infancy; it lay with the neatliest finished border on every
sloping roof, making the dark-red gables stand out with a new depth of
color; it weighed heavily on the laurels and fir-trees, till it fell
from them with a shuddering sound; it clothed the rough turnip-field
with whiteness, and made the sheep look like dark blotches; the gates
were all blocked up with the sloping drifts, and here and there a
disregarded four-footed beast stood as if petrified "in unrecumbent
sadness"; there was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were
one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark
river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow. But old
Christmas smiled as he laid this cruel-seeming spell on the outdoor
world, for he meant to light up home with new brightness, to deepen
all the richness of indoor color, and give a keener edge of delight to
the warm fragrance of food; he meant to prepare a sweet imprisonment
that would strengthen the primitive fellowship of kindred, and make
the sunshine of familiar human faces as welcome as the hidden
day-star. His kindness fell but hardly on the homeless,--fell but
hardly on the homes where the hearth was not very warm, and where the
food had little fragrance; where the human faces had had no sunshine
in them, but rather the leaden, blank-eyed gaze of unexpectant want.
But the fine old season meant well; and if he has not learned the
secret how to bless men impartially, it is because his father Time,
with ever-unrelenting unrelenting purpose, still hides that secret in
his own mighty, slow-beating heart.

And yet this Christmas day, in spite of Tom's fresh delight in home,
was not, he thought, somehow or other, quite so happy as it had always
been before. The red berries were just as abundant on the holly, and
he and Maggie had dressed all the windows and mantlepieces and
picture-frames on Christmas eve with as much taste as ever, wedding
the thick-set scarlet clusters with branches of the black-berried ivy.
There had been singing under the windows after midnight,--supernatural
singing, Maggie always felt, in spite of Tom's contemptuous insistence
that the singers were old Patch, the parish clerk, and the rest of the
church choir; she trembled with awe when their carolling broke in upon
her dreams, and the image of men in fustian clothes was always thrust
away by the vision of angels resting on the parted cloud. The midnight
chant had helped as usual to lift the morning above the level of
common days; and then there were the smell of hot toast and ale from
the kitchen, at the breakfast hour; the favorite anthem, the green
boughs, and the short sermon gave the appropriate festal character to
the church-going; and aunt and uncle Moss, with all their seven
children, were looking like so many reflectors of the bright
parlor-fire, when the church-goers came back, stamping the snow from
their feet. The plum-pudding was of the same handsome roundness as
ever, and came in with the symbolic blue flames around it, as if it
had been heroically snatched from the nether fires, into which it had
been thrown by dyspeptic Puritans; the dessert was as splendid as
ever, with its golden oranges, brown nuts, and the crystalline light
and dark of apple-jelly and damson cheese; in all these things
Christmas was as it had always been since Tom could remember; it was
only distinguished, if by anything, by superior sliding and snowballs.

Christmas was cheery, but not so Mr. Tulliver. He was irate and
defiant; and Tom, though he espoused his father's quarrels and shared
his father's sense of injury, was not without some of the feeling that
oppressed Maggie when Mr. Tulliver got louder and more angry in
narration and assertion with the increased leisure of dessert. The
attention that Tom might have concentrated on his nuts and wine was
distracted by a sense that there were rascally enemies in the world,
and that the business of grown-up life could hardly be conducted
without a good deal of quarrelling. Now, Tom was not fond of
quarrelling, unless it could soon be put an end to by a fair stand-up
fight with an adversary whom he had every chance of thrashing; and his
father's irritable talk made him uncomfortable, though he never
accounted to himself for the feeling, or conceived the notion that his
father was faulty in this respect.

The particular embodiment of the evil principle now exciting Mr.
Tulliver's determined resistance was Mr. Pivart, who, having lands
higher up the Ripple, was taking measures for their irrigation, which
either were, or would be, or were bound to be (on the principle that
water was water), an infringement on Mr. Tulliver's legitimate share
of water-power. Dix, who had a mill on the stream, was a feeble
auxiliary of Old Harry compared with Pivart. Dix had been brought to
his senses by arbitration, and Wakem's advice had not carried _him_
far. No; Dix, Mr. Tulliver considered, had been as good as nowhere in
point of law; and in the intensity of his indignation against Pivart,
his contempt for a baffled adversary like Dix began to wear the air of
a friendly attachment. He had no male audience to-day except Mr. Moss,
who knew nothing, as he said, of the "natur' o' mills," and could only
assent to Mr. Tulliver's arguments on the _a priori_ ground of family
relationship and monetary obligation; but Mr. Tulliver did not talk
with the futile intention of convincing his audience, he talked to
relieve himself; while good Mr. Moss made strong efforts to keep his
eyes wide open, in spite of the sleepiness which an unusually good
dinner produced in his hard-worked frame. Mrs. Moss, more alive to the
subject, and interested in everything that affected her brother,
listened and put in a word as often as maternal preoccupations
allowed.

"Why, Pivart's a new name hereabout, brother, isn't it?" she said; "he
didn't own the land in father's time, nor yours either, before I was
married."

"New name? Yes, I should think it _is_ a new name," said Mr. Tulliver,
with angry emphasis. "Dorlcote Mill's been in our family a hundred
year and better, and nobody ever heard of a Pivart meddling with the
river, till this fellow came and bought Bincome's farm out of hand,
before anybody else could so much as say 'snap.' But I'll _Pivart_
him!" added Mr. Tulliver, lifting his glass with a sense that he had
defined his resolution in an unmistakable manner.

"You won't be forced to go to law with him, I hope, brother?" said
Mrs. Moss, with some anxiety.

"I don't know what I shall be forced to; but I know what I shall force
_him_ to, with his dikes and erigations, if there's any law to be
brought to bear o' the right side. I know well enough who's at the
bottom of it; he's got Wakem to back him and egg him on. I know Wakem
tells him the law can't touch him for it, but there's folks can handle
the law besides Wakem. It takes a big raskil to beat him; but there's
bigger to be found, as know more o' th' ins and outs o' the law, else
how came Wakem to lose Brumley's suit for him?"

Mr. Tulliver was a strictly honest man, and proud of being honest, but
he considered that in law the ends of justice could only be achieved
by employing a stronger knave to frustrate a weaker. Law was a sort of
cock-fight, in which it was the business of injured honesty to get a
game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs.

"Gore's no fool; you needn't tell me that," he observed presently, in
a pugnacious tone, as if poor Gritty had been urging that lawyer's
capabilities; "but, you see, he isn't up to the law as Wakem is. And
water's a very particular thing; you can't pick it up with a
pitchfork. That's why it's been nuts to Old Harry and the lawyers.
It's plain enough what's the rights and the wrongs of water, if you
look at it straight-forrard; for a river's a river, and if you've got
a mill, you must have water to turn it; and it's no use telling me
Pivart's erigation and nonsense won't stop my wheel; I know what
belongs to water better than that. Talk to me o' what th' engineers
say! I say it's common sense, as Pivart's dikes must do me an injury.
But if that's their engineering, I'll put Tom to it by-and-by, and he
shall see if he can't find a bit more sense in th' engineering
business than what _that_ comes to."

Tom, looking round with some anxiety at this announcement of his
prospects, unthinkingly withdrew a small rattle he was amusing baby
Moss with, whereupon she, being a baby that knew her own mind with
remarkable clearness, instantaneously expressed her sentiments in a
piercing yell, and was not to be appeased even by the restoration of
the rattle, feeling apparently that the original wrong of having it
taken from her remained in all its force. Mrs. Moss hurried away with
her into another room, and expressed to Mrs. Tulliver, who accompanied
her, the conviction that the dear child had good reasons for crying;
implying that if it was supposed to be the rattle that baby clamored
for, she was a misunderstood baby. The thoroughly justifiable yell
being quieted, Mrs. Moss looked at her sister-in-law and said,--

"I'm sorry to see brother so put out about this water work."

"It's your brother's way, Mrs. Moss; I'd never anything o' that sort
before I was married," said Mrs. Tulliver, with a half-implied
reproach. She always spoke of her husband as "your brother" to Mrs.
Moss in any case when his line of conduct was not matter of pure
admiration. Amiable Mrs. Tulliver, who was never angry in her life,
had yet her mild share of that spirit without which she could hardly
have been at once a Dodson and a woman. Being always on the defensive
toward her own sisters, it was natural that she should be keenly
conscious of her superiority, even as the weakest Dodson, over a
husband's sister, who, besides being poorly off, and inclined to "hang
on" her brother, had the good-natured submissiveness of a large,
easy-tempered, untidy, prolific woman, with affection enough in her
not only for her own husband and abundant children, but for any number
of collateral relations.

"I hope and pray he won't go to law," said Mrs. Moss, "for there's
never any knowing where that'll end. And the right doesn't allays win.
This Mr. Pivart's a rich man, by what I can make out, and the rich
mostly get things their own way."

"As to that," said Mrs. Tulliver, stroking her dress down, "I've seen
what riches are in my own family; for my sisters have got husbands as
can afford to do pretty much what they like. But I think sometimes I
shall be drove off my head with the talk about this law and erigation;
and my sisters lay all the fault to me, for they don't know what it is
to marry a man like your brother; how should they? Sister Pullet has
her own way from morning till night."

"Well," said Mrs. Moss, "I don't think I should like my husband if he
hadn't got any wits of his own, and I had to find head-piece for him.
It's a deal easier to do what pleases one's husband, than to be
puzzling what else one should do."

"If people come to talk o' doing what pleases their husbands," said
Mrs. Tulliver, with a faint imitation of her sister Glegg, "I'm sure
your brother might have waited a long while before he'd have found a
wife that 'ud have let him have his say in everything, as I do. It's
nothing but law and erigation now, from when we first get up in the
morning till we go to bed at night; and I never contradict him; I only
say, 'Well, Mr. Tulliver, do as you like; but whativer you do, don't
go to law."

Mrs. Tulliver, as we have seen, was not without influence over her
husband. No woman is; she can always incline him to do either what she
wishes, or the reverse; and on the composite impulses that were
threatening to hurry Mr. Tulliver into "law," Mrs. Tulliver's
monotonous pleading had doubtless its share of force; it might even be
comparable to that proverbial feather which has the credit or
discredit of breaking the camel's back; though, on a strictly
impartial view, the blame ought rather to lie with the previous weight
of feathers which had already placed the back in such imminent peril
that an otherwise innocent feather could not settle on it without
mischief. Not that Mrs. Tulliver's feeble beseeching could have had
this feather's weight in virtue of her single personality; but
whenever she departed from entire assent to her husband, he saw in her
the representative of the Dodson family; and it was a guiding
principle with Mr. Tulliver to let the Dodsons know that they were not
to domineer over _him_, or--more specifically--that a male Tulliver
was far more than equal to four female Dodsons, even though one of
them was Mrs. Glegg.

But not even a direct argument from that typical Dodson female herself
against his going to law could have heightened his disposition toward
it so much as the mere thought of Wakem, continually freshened by the
sight of the too able attorney on market-days. Wakem, to his certain
knowledge, was (metaphorically speaking) at the bottom of Pivart's
irrigation; Wakem had tried to make Dix stand out, and go to law about
the dam; it was unquestionably Wakem who had caused Mr. Tulliver to
lose the suit about the right of road and the bridge that made a
thoroughfare of his land for every vagabond who preferred an
opportunity of damaging private property to walking like an honest man
along the highroad; all lawyers were more or less rascals, but Wakem's
rascality was of that peculiarly aggravated kind which placed itself
in opposition to that form of right embodied in Mr. Tulliver's
interests and opinions. And as an extra touch of bitterness, the
injured miller had recently, in borrowing the five hundred pounds,
been obliged to carry a little business to Wakem's office on his own
account. A hook-nosed glib fellow! as cool as a cucumber,--always
looking so sure of his game! And it was vexatious that Lawyer Gore was
not more like him, but was a bald, round-featured man, with bland
manners and fat hands; a game-cock that you would be rash to bet upon
against Wakem. Gore was a sly fellow. His weakness did not lie on the
side of scrupulosity; but the largest amount of winking, however
significant, is not equivalent to seeing through a stone wall; and
confident as Mr. Tulliver was in his principle that water was water,
and in the direct inference that Pivart had not a leg to stand on in
this affair of irrigation, he had an uncomfortable suspicion that
Wakem had more law to show against this (rationally) irrefragable
inference than Gore could show for it. But then, if they went to law,
there was a chance for Mr. Tulliver to employ Counsellor Wylde on his
side, instead of having that admirable bully against him; and the
prospect of seeing a witness of Wakem's made to perspire and become
confounded, as Mr. Tulliver's witness had once been, was alluring to
the love of retributive justice.

Much rumination had Mr. Tulliver on these puzzling subjects during his
rides on the gray horse; much turning of the head from side to side,
as the scales dipped alternately; but the probable result was still
out of sight, only to be reached through much hot argument and
iteration in domestic and social life. That initial stage of the
dispute which consisted in the narration of the case and the
enforcement of Mr. Tulliver's views concerning it throughout the
entire circle of his connections would necessarily take time; and at
the beginning of February, when Tom was going to school again, there
were scarcely any new items to be detected in his father's statement
of the case against Pivart, or any more specific indication of the
measures he was bent on taking against that rash contravener of the
principle that water was water. Iteration, like friction, is likely to
generate heat instead of progress, and Mr. Tulliver's heat was
certainly more and more palpable. If there had been no new evidence on
any other point, there had been new evidence that Pivart was as "thick
as mud" with Wakem.

"Father," said Tom, one evening near the end of the holidays, "uncle
Glegg says Lawyer Wakem _is_ going to send his son to Mr. Stelling. It
isn't true, what they said about his going to be sent to France. You
won't like me to go to school with Wakem's son, shall you?"

"It's no matter for that, my boy," said Mr. Tulliver; "don't you learn
anything bad of him, that's all. The lad's a poor deformed creatur,
and takes after his mother in the face; I think there isn't much of
his father in him. It's a sign Wakem thinks high o' Mr. Sterling, as
he sends his son to him, and Wakem knows meal from bran."

Mr. Tulliver in his heart was rather proud of the fact that his son
was to have the same advantages as Wakem's; but Tom was not at all
easy on the point. It would have been much clearer if the lawyer's son
had not been deformed, for then Tom would have had the prospect of
pitching into him with all that freedom which is derived from a high
moral sanction.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The narrator describes how the Tulliver house is very cheery at Christmastime. But Tom notices that something seems a little off. Turns out that Mr. Tulliver is in a terrible mood. Some man in the neighborhood, a Mr. Privart, is trying some new irrigation techniques and it's interfering with Tulliver's Mill, which runs on water power. This new guy is also a client of Mr. Wakem, the evil lawyer. Mr. Tulliver keeps ranting and Mr. and Mrs. Moss are confused by the whole thing. Mr. Tulliver announces that he'll make Tom an engineer so that he can figure out this irrigation business. Tom is rather alarmed by that announcement. He thought he'd run a mill just like his dad. Mrs. Moss and Mrs. Tulliver agree that getting involved in lawsuits is a bad idea and they hope Mr. Tulliver won't do it. , which is all about a legal case over a disputed will that lasts for decades.) We learn that Mr. Tulliver has a history of getting involved in lawsuits and legal disputes. Mr. Tulliver's own lawyer, Mr. Gore, isn't really the best of lawyers. He actually sounds a bit like Barry, the world's worst lawyer, from Arrested Development. Mr. Wakem is unfortunately a superstar lawyer, albeit an evil one. At the end of his holidays Tom tells his dad that he heard a rumor: apparently Mr. Wakem is sending his son to study with Mr. Stelling. Mr. Tulliver says it's true and tells Tom to be nice to the son since he's deformed. He says that Mr. Wakem obviously thinks Mr. Stelling is a good teacher, so it's all cool really. Tom is not looking forward to meeting a deformed Wakem.


prompt:
Chapter: The New Schoolfellow

It was a cold, wet January day on which Tom went back to school; a day
quite in keeping with this severe phase of his destiny. If he had not
carried in his pocket a parcel of sugar-candy and a small Dutch doll
for little Laura, there would have been no ray of expected pleasure to
enliven the general gloom. But he liked to think how Laura would put
out her lips and her tiny hands for the bits of sugarcandy; and to
give the greater keenness to these pleasures of imagination, he took
out the parcel, made a small hole in the paper, and bit off a crystal
or two, which had so solacing an effect under the confined prospect
and damp odors of the gig-umbrella, that he repeated the process more
than once on his way.

"Well, Tulliver, we're glad to see you again," said Mr. Stelling,
heartily. "Take off your wrappings and come into the study till
dinner. You'll find a bright fire there, and a new companion."

Tom felt in an uncomfortable flutter as he took off his woollen
comforter and other wrappings. He had seen Philip Wakem at St. Ogg's,
but had always turned his eyes away from him as quickly as possible.
He would have disliked having a deformed boy for his companion, even
if Philip had not been the son of a bad man. And Tom did not see how a
bad man's son could be very good. His own father was a good man, and
he would readily have fought any one who said the contrary. He was in
a state of mingled embarrassment and defiance as he followed Mr.
Stelling to the study.

"Here is a new companion for you to shake hands with, Tulliver," said
that gentleman on entering the study,--"Master Philip Wakem. I shall
leave you to make acquaintance by yourselves. You already know
something of each other, I imagine; for you are neighbors at home."

Tom looked confused and awkward, while Philip rose and glanced at him
timidly. Tom did not like to go up and put out his hand, and he was
not prepared to say, "How do you do?" on so short a notice.

Mr. Stelling wisely turned away, and closed the door behind him; boys'
shyness only wears off in the absence of their elders.

Philip was at once too proud and too timid to walk toward Tom. He
thought, or rather felt, that Tom had an aversion to looking at him;
every one, almost, disliked looking at him; and his deformity was more
conspicuous when he walked. So they remained without shaking hands or
even speaking, while Tom went to the fire and warmed himself, every
now and then casting furtive glances at Philip, who seemed to be
drawing absently first one object and then another on a piece of paper
he had before him. He had seated himself again, and as he drew, was
thinking what he could say to Tom, and trying to overcome his own
repugnance to making the first advances.

Tom began to look oftener and longer at Philip's face, for he could
see it without noticing the hump, and it was really not a disagreeable
face,--very old-looking, Tom thought. He wondered how much older
Philip was than himself. An anatomist--even a mere physiognomist--
would have seen that the deformity of Philip's spine was not a
congenital hump, but the result of an accident in infancy; but you
do not expect from Tom any acquaintance with such distinctions;
to him, Philip was simply a humpback. He had a vague notion
that the deformity of Wakem's son had some relation to the lawyer's
rascality, of which he had so often heard his father talk with hot
emphasis; and he felt, too, a half-admitted fear of him as probably
a spiteful fellow, who, not being able to fight you, had cunning
ways of doing you a mischief by the sly. There was a humpbacked
tailor in the neighborhood of Mr. Jacobs's academy, who was considered
a very unamiable character, and was much hooted after by public-spirited
boys solely on the ground of his unsatisfactory moral qualities; so
that Tom was not without a basis of fact to go upon. Still, no face
could be more unlike that ugly tailor's than this melancholy boy's
face,--the brown hair round it waved and curled at the ends like a
girl's; Tom thought that truly pitiable. This Wakem was a pale,
puny fellow, and it was quite clear he would not be able to play at
anything worth speaking of; but he handled his pencil in an enviable
manner, and was apparently making one thing after another without
any trouble. What was he drawing? Tom was quite warm now, and wanted
something new to be going forward. It was certainly more agreeable
to have an ill-natured humpback as a companion than to stand looking
out of the study window at the rain, and kicking his foot against
the washboard in solitude; something would happen every day,--
"a quarrel or something"; and Tom thought he should rather like to
show Philip that he had better not try his spiteful tricks on _him_.
He suddenly walked across the hearth and looked over Philip's paper.

"Why, that's a donkey with panniers, and a spaniel, and partridges in
the corn!" he exclaimed, his tongue being completely loosed by
surprise and admiration. "Oh my buttons! I wish I could draw like
that. I'm to learn drawing this half; I wonder if I shall learn to
make dogs and donkeys!"

"Oh, you can do them without learning," said Philip; "I never learned
drawing."

"Never learned?" said Tom, in amazement. "Why, when I make dogs and
horses, and those things, the heads and the legs won't come right;
though I can see how they ought to be very well. I can make houses,
and all sorts of chimneys,--chimneys going all down the wall,--and
windows in the roof, and all that. But I dare say I could do dogs and
horses if I was to try more," he added, reflecting that Philip might
falsely suppose that he was going to "knock under," if he were too
frank about the imperfection of his accomplishments.

"Oh, yes," said Philip, "it's very easy. You've only to look well at
things, and draw them over and over again. What you do wrong once, you
can alter the next time."

"But haven't you been taught _any_thing?" said Tom, beginning to have
a puzzled suspicion that Philip's crooked back might be the source of
remarkable faculties. "I thought you'd been to school a long while."

"Yes," said Philip, smiling; "I've been taught Latin and Greek and
mathematics, and writing and such things."

"Oh, but I say, you don't like Latin, though, do you?" said Tom,
lowering his voice confidentially.

"Pretty well; I don't care much about it," said Philip.

"Ah, but perhaps you haven't got into the _Propria quae maribus_," said
Tom, nodding his head sideways, as much as to say, "that was the test;
it was easy talking till you came to _that_."

Philip felt some bitter complacency in the promising stupidity of this
well-made, active-looking boy; but made polite by his own extreme
sensitiveness, as well as by his desire to conciliate, he checked his
inclination to laugh, and said quietly,--

"I've done with the grammar; I don't learn that any more."

"Then you won't have the same lessons as I shall?" said Tom, with a
sense of disappointment.

"No; but I dare say I can help you. I shall be very glad to help you
if I can."

Tom did not say "Thank you," for he was quite absorbed in the thought
that Wakem's son did not seem so spiteful a fellow as might have been
expected.

"I say," he said presently, "do you love your father?"

"Yes," said Philip, coloring deeply; "don't you love yours?"

"Oh yes--I only wanted to know," said Tom, rather ashamed of himself,
now he saw Philip coloring and looking uncomfortable. He found much
difficulty in adjusting his attitude of mind toward the son of Lawyer
Wakem, and it had occurred to him that if Philip disliked his father,
that fact might go some way toward clearing up his perplexity.

"Shall you learn drawing now?" he said, by way of changing the
subject.

"No," said Philip. "My father wishes me to give all my time to other
things now."

"What! Latin and Euclid, and those things?" said Tom.

"Yes," said Philip, who had left off using his pencil, and was resting
his head on one hand, while Tom was learning forward on both elbows,
and looking with increasing admiration at the dog and the donkey.

"And you don't mind that?" said Tom, with strong curiosity.

"No; I like to know what everybody else knows. I can study what I like
by-and-by."

"I can't think why anybody should learn Latin," said Tom. "It's no
good."

"It's part of the education of a gentleman," said Philip. "All
gentlemen learn the same things."

"What! do you think Sir John Crake, the master of the harriers, knows
Latin?" said Tom, who had often thought he should like to resemble Sir
John Crake.

"He learned it when he was a boy, of course," said Philip. "But I dare
say he's forgotten it."

"Oh, well, I can do that, then," said Tom, not with any epigrammatic
intention, but with serious satisfaction at the idea that, as far as
Latin was concerned, there was no hindrance to his resembling Sir John
Crake. "Only you're obliged to remember it while you're at school,
else you've got to learn ever so many lines of 'Speaker.' Mr.
Stelling's very particular--did you know? He'll have you up ten times
if you say 'nam' for 'jam,'--he won't let you go a letter wrong, _I_
can tell you."

"Oh, I don't mind," said Philip, unable to choke a laugh; "I can
remember things easily. And there are some lessons I'm very fond of.
I'm very fond of Greek history, and everything about the Greeks. I
should like to have been a Greek and fought the Persians, and then
have come home and have written tragedies, or else have been listened
to by everybody for my wisdom, like Socrates, and have died a grand
death." (Philip, you perceive, was not without a wish to impress the
well-made barbarian with a sense of his mental superiority.)

"Why, were the Greeks great fighters?" said Tom, who saw a vista in
this direction. "Is there anything like David and Goliath and Samson
in the Greek history? Those are the only bits I like in the history of
the Jews."

"Oh, there are very fine stories of that sort about the Greeks,--about
the heroes of early times who killed the wild beasts, as Samson did.
And in the Odyssey--that's a beautiful poem--there's a more wonderful
giant than Goliath,--Polypheme, who had only one eye in the middle of
his forehead; and Ulysses, a little fellow, but very wise and cunning,
got a red-hot pine-tree and stuck it into this one eye, and made him
roar like a thousand bulls."

"Oh, what fun!" said Tom, jumping away from the table, and stamping
first with one leg and then the other. "I say, can you tell me all
about those stories? Because I sha'n't learn Greek, you know. Shall
I?" he added, pausing in his stamping with a sudden alarm, lest the
contrary might be possible. "Does every gentleman learn Greek? Will
Mr. Stelling make me begin with it, do you think?"

"No, I should think not, very likely not," said Philip. "But you may
read those stories without knowing Greek. I've got them in English."

"Oh, but I don't like reading; I'd sooner have you tell them me. But
only the fighting ones, you know. My sister Maggie is always wanting
to tell me stories, but they're stupid things. Girls' stories always
are. Can you tell a good many fighting stories?"

"Oh yes," said Philip; "lots of them, besides the Greek stories. I can
tell you about Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Saladin, and about William
Wallace and Robert Bruce and James Douglas,--I know no end."

"You're older than I am, aren't you?" said Tom.

"Why, how old are _you?_ I'm fifteen."

"I'm only going in fourteen," said Tom. "But I thrashed all the
fellows at Jacob's--that's where I was before I came here. And I beat
'em all at bandy and climbing. And I wish Mr. Stelling would let us go
fishing. _I_ could show you how to fish. You _could_ fish, couldn't
you? It's only standing, and sitting still, you know."

Tom, in his turn, wished to make the balance dip in his favor. This
hunchback must not suppose that his acquaintance with fighting stories
put him on a par with an actual fighting hero, like Tom Tulliver.
Philip winced under this allusion to his unfitness for active sports,
and he answered almost peevishly,--

"I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching
a line hour after hour, or else throwing and throwing, and catching
nothing."

"Ah, but you wouldn't say they looked like fools when they landed a
big pike, I can tell you," said Tom, who had never caught anything
that was "big" in his life, but whose imagination was on the stretch
with indignant zeal for the honor of sport. Wakem's son, it was plain,
had his disagreeable points, and must be kept in due check. Happily
for the harmony of this first interview, they were now called to
dinner, and Philip was not allowed to develop farther his unsound
views on the subject of fishing. But Tom said to himself, that was
just what he should have expected from a hunchback.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Tom goes back to school and meets Philip Wakem. Philip has a hunchback and Tom is uncomfortable around him. Philip and Tom are both proud and shy so they don't say much to each other during their first meeting. It's all very awkward. Tom notices that Philip is not only deformed, but he also looks a bit like a girl. Philip is pale and small and has curly brown hair. But Philip is a good artist, and Tom is intrigued by his pictures. So the two finally strike up a conversation over drawing. Philip says he taught himself to draw and Tom is impressed. It turns out that Philip already knows Latin and he's at Mr. Stelling's to learn some more advanced subjects. Tom then asks Philip about his dad, which makes Philip uncomfortable. The boys discuss school: Philip says he can learn the things he wants to in the future and he'll just study Latin and stuff for now. Tom likes this plan. Philip then impresses Tom with his knowledge of Greek and Roman history and all the cool battles. We learn that Philip is fifteen and Tom is nearly fourteen. Tom starts talking about fishing and Philip thinks fishing is dumb. The boys are called to dinner before they can argue about it.


prompt:
Chapter: "The Young Idea"

The alterations of feeling in that first dialogue between Tom and
Philip continued to make their intercourse even after many weeks of
schoolboy intimacy. Tom never quite lost the feeling that Philip,
being the son of a "rascal," was his natural enemy; never thoroughly
overcame his repulsion to Philip's deformity. He was a boy who adhered
tenaciously to impressions once received; as with all minds in which
mere perception predominates over thought and emotion, the external
remained to him rigidly what it was in the first instance. But then it
was impossible not to like Philip's company when he was in a good
humor; he could help one so well in one's Latin exercises, which Tom
regarded as a kind of puzzle that could only be found out by a lucky
chance; and he could tell such wonderful fighting stories about Hal of
the Wynd, for example, and other heroes who were especial favorites
with Tom, because they laid about them with heavy strokes. He had
small opinion of Saladin, whose cimeter could cut a cushion in two in
an instant; who wanted to cut cushions? That was a stupid story, and
he didn't care to hear it again. But when Robert Bruce, on the black
pony, rose in his stirrups, and lifting his good battle-axe, cracked
at once the helmet and the skull of the too hasty knight at
Bannockburn, then Tom felt all the exaltation of sympathy, and if he
had had a cocoanut at hand, he would have cracked it at once with the
poker. Philip in his happier moods indulged Tom to the top of his
bent, heightening the crash and bang and fury of every fight with all
the artillery of epithets and similes at his command. But he was not
always in a good humor or happy mood. The slight spurt of peevish
susceptibility which had escaped him in their first interview was a
symptom of a perpetually recurring mental ailment, half of it nervous
irritability, half of it the heart-bitterness produced by the sense of
his deformity. In these fits of susceptibility every glance seemed to
him to be charged either with offensive pity or with ill-repressed
disgust; at the very least it was an indifferent glance, and Philip
felt indifference as a child of the south feels the chill air of a
northern spring. Poor Tom's blundering patronage when they were out of
doors together would sometimes make him turn upon the well-meaning lad
quite savagely; and his eyes, usually sad and quiet, would flash with
anything but playful lightning. No wonder Tom retained his suspicions
of the humpback.

But Philip's self-taught skill in drawing was another link between
them; for Tom found, to his disgust, that his new drawing-master gave
him no dogs and donkeys to draw, but brooks and rustic bridges and
ruins, all with a general softness of black-lead surface, indicating
that nature, if anything, was rather satiny; and as Tom's feeling for
the picturesque in landscape was at present quite latent, it is not
surprising that Mr. Goodrich's productions seemed to him an
uninteresting form of art. Mr. Tulliver, having a vague intention that
Tom should be put to some business which included the drawing out of
plans and maps, had complained to Mr. Riley, when he saw him at
Mudport, that Tom seemed to be learning nothing of that sort;
whereupon that obliging adviser had suggested that Tom should have
drawing-lessons. Mr. Tulliver must not mind paying extra for drawing;
let Tom be made a good draughtsman, and he would be able to turn his
pencil to any purpose. So it was ordered that Tom should have
drawing-lessons; and whom should Mr. Stelling have selected as a
master if not Mr. Goodrich, who was considered quite at the head of
his profession within a circuit of twelve miles round King's Lorton?
By which means Tom learned to make an extremely fine point to his
pencil, and to represent landscape with a "broad generality," which,
doubtless from a narrow tendency in his mind to details, he thought
extremely dull.

All this, you remember, happened in those dark ages when there were no
schools of design; before schoolmasters were invariably men of
scrupulous integrity, and before the clergy were all men of enlarged
minds and varied culture. In those less favored days, it is no fable
that there were other clergymen besides Mr. Stelling who had narrow
intellects and large wants, and whose income, by a logical confusion
to which Fortune, being a female as well as blindfold, is peculiarly
liable, was proportioned not to their wants but to their intellect,
with which income has clearly no inherent relation. The problem these
gentlemen had to solve was to readjust the proportion between their
wants and their income; and since wants are not easily starved to
death, the simpler method appeared to be to raise their income. There
was but one way of doing this; any of those low callings in which men
are obliged to do good work at a low price were forbidden to
clergymen; was it their fault if their only resource was to turn out
very poor work at a high price? Besides, how should Mr. Stelling be
expected to know that education was a delicate and difficult business,
any more than an animal endowed with a power of boring a hole through
a rock should be expected to have wide views of excavation? Mr.
Stelling's faculties had been early trained to boring in a straight
line, and he had no faculty to spare. But among Tom's contemporaries,
whose fathers cast their sons on clerical instruction to find them
ignorant after many days, there were many far less lucky than Tom
Tulliver. Education was almost entirely a matter of luck--usually of
ill-luck--in those distant days. The state of mind in which you take a
billiard-cue or a dice-box in your hand is one of sober certainty
compared with that of old-fashioned fathers, like Mr. Tulliver, when
they selected a school or a tutor for their sons. Excellent men, who
had been forced all their lives to spell on an impromptu-phonetic
system, and having carried on a successful business in spite of this
disadvantage, had acquired money enough to give their sons a better
start in life than they had had themselves, must necessarily take
their chance as to the conscience and the competence of the
schoolmaster whose circular fell in their way, and appeared to promise
so much more than they would ever have thought of asking for,
including the return of linen, fork, and spoon. It was happy for them
if some ambitious draper of their acquaintance had not brought up his
son to the Church, and if that young gentleman, at the age of
four-and-twenty, had not closed his college dissipations by an
imprudent marriage; otherwise, these innocent fathers, desirous of
doing the best for their offspring, could only escape the draper's son
by happening to be on the foundation of a grammar-school as yet
unvisited by commissioners, where two or three boys could have, all to
themselves, the advantages of a large and lofty building, together
with a head-master, toothless, dim-eyed and deaf, whose erudite
indistinctness and inattention were engrossed by them at the rate of
three hundred pounds a-head,--a ripe scholar, doubtless, when first
appointed; but all ripeness beneath the sun has a further stage less
esteemed in the market.

Tom Tulliver, then, compared with many other British youths of his
time who have since had to scramble through life with some fragments
of more or less relevant knowledge, and a great deal of strictly
relevant ignorance, was not so very unlucky. Mr. Stelling was a
broad-chested, healthy man, with the bearing of a gentleman, a
conviction that a growing boy required a sufficiency of beef, and a
certain hearty kindness in him that made him like to see Tom looking
well and enjoying his dinner; not a man of refined conscience, or with
any deep sense of the infinite issues belonging to every-day duties,
not quite competent to his high offices; but incompetent gentlemen
must live, and without private fortune it is difficult to see how they
could all live genteelly if they had nothing to do with education or
government. Besides, it was the fault of Tom's mental constitution
that his faculties could not be nourished on the sort of knowledge Mr.
Stelling had to communicate. A boy born with a deficient power of
apprehending signs and abstractions must suffer the penalty of his
congenital deficiency, just as if he had been born with one leg
shorter than the other. A method of education sanctioned by the long
practice of our venerable ancestors was not to give way before the
exceptional dulness of a boy who was merely living at the time then
present. And Mr. Stelling was convinced that a boy so stupid at signs
and abstractions must be stupid at everything else, even if that
reverend gentleman could have taught him everything else. It was the
practice of our venerable ancestors to apply that ingenious instrument
the thumb-screw, and to tighten and tighten it in order to elicit
non-existent facts; they had a fixed opinion to begin with, that the
facts were existent, and what had they to do but to tighten the
thumb-screw? In like manner, Mr. Stelling had a fixed opinion that all
boys with any capacity could learn what it was the only regular thing
to teach; if they were slow, the thumb-screw must be tightened,--the
exercises must be insisted on with increased severity, and a page of
Virgil be awarded as a penalty, to encourage and stimulate a too
languid inclination to Latin verse.

The thumb-screw was a little relaxed, however, during this second
half-year. Philip was so advanced in his studies, and so apt, that Mr.
Stelling could obtain credit by his facility, which required little
help, much more easily than by the troublesome process of overcoming
Tom's dulness. Gentlemen with broad chests and ambitious intentions do
sometimes disappoint their friends by failing to carry the world
before them. Perhaps it is that high achievements demand some other
unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes;
perhaps it is that these stalwart gentlemen are rather indolent, their
_divinae particulum aurae_ being obstructed from soaring by a too hearty
appetite. Some reason or other there was why Mr. Stelling deferred the
execution of many spirited projects,--why he did not begin the editing
of his Greek play, or any other work of scholarship, in his leisure
hours, but, after turning the key of his private study with much
resolution, sat down to one of Theodore Hook's novels. Tom was
gradually allowed to shuffle through his lessons with less rigor, and
having Philip to help him, he was able to make some show of having
applied his mind in a confused and blundering way, without being
cross-examined into a betrayal that his mind had been entirely neutral
in the matter. He thought school much more bearable under this
modification of circumstances; and he went on contentedly enough,
picking up a promiscuous education chiefly from things that were not
intended as education at all. What was understood to be his education
was simply the practice of reading, writing, and spelling, carried on
by an elaborate appliance of unintelligible ideas, and by much failure
in the effort to learn by rote.

Nevertheless, there was a visible improvement in Tom under this
training; perhaps because he was not a boy in the abstract, existing
solely to illustrate the evils of a mistaken education, but a boy made
of flesh and blood, with dispositions not entirely at the mercy of
circumstances.

There was a great improvement in his bearing, for example; and some
credit on this score was due to Mr. Poulter, the village schoolmaster,
who, being an old Peninsular soldier, was employed to drill Tom,--a
source of high mutual pleasure. Mr. Poulter, who was understood by the
company at the Black Swan to have once struck terror into the hearts
of the French, was no longer personally formidable. He had rather a
shrunken appearance, and was tremulous in the mornings, not from age,
but from the extreme perversity of the King's Lorton boys, which
nothing but gin could enable him to sustain with any firmness. Still,
he carried himself with martial erectness, had his clothes
scrupulously brushed, and his trousers tightly strapped; and on the
Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, when he came to Tom, he was always
inspired with gin and old memories, which gave him an exceptionally
spirited air, as of a superannuated charger who hears the drum. The
drilling-lessons were always protracted by episodes of warlike
narrative, much more interesting to Tom than Philip's stories out of
the Iliad; for there were no cannon in the Iliad, and besides, Tom had
felt some disgust on learning that Hector and Achilles might possibly
never have existed. But the Duke of Wellington was really alive, and
Bony had not been long dead; therefore Mr. Poulter's reminiscences of
the Peninsular War were removed from all suspicion of being mythical.
Mr. Poulter, it appeared, had been a conspicuous figure at Talavera,
and had contributed not a little to the peculiar terror with which his
regiment of infantry was regarded by the enemy. On afternoons when his
memory was more stimulated than usual, he remembered that the Duke of
Wellington had (in strict privacy, lest jealousies should be awakened)
expressed his esteem for that fine fellow Poulter. The very surgeon
who attended him in the hospital after he had received his
gunshot-wound had been profoundly impressed with the superiority of
Mr. Poulter's flesh,--no other flesh would have healed in anything
like the same time. On less personal matters connected with the
important warfare in which he had been engaged, Mr. Poulter was more
reticent, only taking care not to give the weight of his authority to
any loose notions concerning military history. Any one who pretended
to a knowledge of what occurred at the siege of Badajos was especially
an object of silent pity to Mr. Poulter; he wished that prating person
had been run down, and had the breath trampled out of him at the first
go-off, as he himself had,--he might talk about the siege of Badajos
then! Tom did not escape irritating his drilling-master occasionally,
by his curiosity concerning other military matters than Mr. Poulter's
personal experience.

"And General Wolfe, Mr. Poulter,--wasn't he a wonderful fighter?" said
Tom, who held the notion that all the martial heroes commemorated on
the public-house signs were engaged in the war with Bony.

"Not at all!" said Mr. Poulter, contemptuously. "Nothing o' the sort!
Heads up!" he added, in a tone of stern command, which delighted Tom,
and made him feel as if he were a regiment in his own person.

"No, no!" Mr. Poulter would continue, on coming to a pause in his
discipline; "they'd better not talk to me about General Wolfe. He did
nothing but die of his wound; that's a poor haction, I consider. Any
other man 'ud have died o' the wounds I've had. One of my sword-cuts
'ud ha' killed a fellow like General Wolfe."

"Mr. Poulter," Tom would say, at any allusion to the sword, "I wish
you'd bring your sword and do the sword-exercise!"

For a long while Mr. Poulter only shook his head in a significant
manner at this request, and smiled patronizingly, as Jupiter may have
done when Semele urged her too ambitious request. But one afternoon,
when a sudden shower of heavy rain had detained Mr. Poulter twenty
minutes longer than usual at the Black Swan, the sword was
brought,--just for Tom to look at.

"And this is the real sword you fought with in all the battles, Mr.
Poulter?" said Tom, handling the hilt. "Has it ever cut a Frenchman's
head off?"

"Head off? Ah! and would, if he'd had three heads."

"But you had a gun and bayonet besides?" said Tom. "_I_ should like
the gun and bayonet best, because you could shoot 'em first and spear
'em after. Bang! Ps-s-s-s!" Tom gave the requisite pantomime to
indicate the double enjoyment of pulling the trigger and thrusting the
spear.

"Ah, but the sword's the thing when you come to close fighting," said
Mr. Poulter, involuntarily falling in with Tom's enthusiasm, and
drawing the sword so suddenly that Tom leaped back with much agility.

"Oh, but, Mr. Poulter, if you're going to do the exercise," said Tom,
a little conscious that he had not stood his ground as became an
Englishman, "let me go and call Philip. He'll like to see you, you
know."

"What! the humpbacked lad?" said Mr. Poulter, contemptuously; "what's
the use of _his_ looking on?"

"Oh, but he knows a great deal about fighting," said Tom, "and how
they used to fight with bows and arrows, and battle-axes."

"Let him come, then. I'll show him something different from his bows
and arrows," said Mr. Poulter, coughing and drawing himself up, while
he gave a little preliminary play to his wrist.

Tom ran in to Philip, who was enjoying his afternoon's holiday at the
piano, in the drawing-room, picking out tunes for himself and singing
them. He was supremely happy, perched like an amorphous bundle on the
high stool, with his head thrown back, his eyes fixed on the opposite
cornice, and his lips wide open, sending forth, with all his might,
impromptu syllables to a tune of Arne's which had hit his fancy.

"Come, Philip," said Tom, bursting in; "don't stay roaring 'la la'
there; come and see old Poulter do his sword-exercise in the
carriage-house!"

The jar of this interruption, the discord of Tom's tones coming across
the notes to which Philip was vibrating in soul and body, would have
been enough to unhinge his temper, even if there had been no question
of Poulter the drilling-master; and Tom, in the hurry of seizing
something to say to prevent Mr. Poulter from thinking he was afraid of
the sword when he sprang away from it, had alighted on this
proposition to fetch Philip, though he knew well enough that Philip
hated to hear him mention his drilling-lessons. Tom would never have
done so inconsiderate a thing except under the severe stress of his
personal pride.

Philip shuddered visibly as he paused from his music. Then turning
red, he said, with violent passion,--

"Get away, you lumbering idiot! Don't come bellowing at me; you're not
fit to speak to anything but a cart-horse!"

It was not the first time Philip had been made angry by him, but Tom
had never before been assailed with verbal missiles that he understood
so well.

"I'm fit to speak to something better than you, you poor-spirited
imp!" said Tom, lighting up immediately at Philip's fire. "You know I
won't hit you, because you're no better than a girl. But I'm an honest
man's son, and _your_ father's a rogue; everybody says so!"

Tom flung out of the room, and slammed the door after him, made
strangely heedless by his anger; for to slam doors within the hearing
of Mrs. Stelling, who was probably not far off, was an offence only to
be wiped out by twenty lines of Virgil. In fact, that lady did
presently descend from her room, in double wonder at the noise and the
subsequent cessation of Philip's music. She found him sitting in a
heap on the hassock, and crying bitterly.

"What's the matter, Wakem? what was that noise about? Who slammed the
door?"

Philip looked up, and hastily dried his eyes. "It was Tulliver who
came in--to ask me to go out with him."

"And what are you in trouble about?" said Mrs. Stelling.

Philip was not her favorite of the two pupils; he was less obliging
than Tom, who was made useful in many ways. Still, his father paid
more than Mr. Tulliver did, and she meant him to feel that she behaved
exceedingly well to him. Philip, however, met her advances toward a
good understanding very much as a caressed mollusk meets an invitation
to show himself out of his shell. Mrs. Stelling was not a loving,
tender-hearted woman; she was a woman whose skirt sat well, who
adjusted her waist and patted her curls with a preoccupied air when
she inquired after your welfare. These things, doubtless, represent a
great social power, but it is not the power of love; and no other
power could win Philip from his personal reserve.

He said, in answer to her question, "My toothache came on, and made me
hysterical again."

This had been the fact once, and Philip was glad of the recollection;
it was like an inspiration to enable him to excuse his crying. He had
to accept eau-de-Cologne and to refuse creosote in consequence; but
that was easy.

Meanwhile Tom, who had for the first time sent a poisoned arrow into
Philip's heart, had returned to the carriage-house, where he found Mr.
Poulter, with a fixed and earnest eye, wasting the perfections of his
sword-exercise on probably observant but inappreciative rats. But Mr.
Poulter was a host in himself; that is to say, he admired himself more
than a whole army of spectators could have admired him. He took no
notice of Tom's return, being too entirely absorbed in the cut and
thrust,--the solemn one, two, three, four; and Tom, not without a
slight feeling of alarm at Mr. Poulter's fixed eye and hungry-looking
sword, which seemed impatient for something else to cut besides the
air, admired the performance from as great a distance as possible. It
was not until Mr. Poulter paused and wiped the perspiration from his
forehead, that Tom felt the full charm of the sword-exercise, and
wished it to be repeated.

"Mr. Poulter," said Tom, when the sword was being finally sheathed, "I
wish you'd lend me your sword a little while to keep."

"No no, young gentleman," said Mr. Poulter, shaking his head
decidedly; "you might do yourself some mischief with it."

"No, I'm sure I wouldn't; I'm sure I'd take care and not hurt myself.
I shouldn't take it out of the sheath much, but I could ground arms
with it, and all that."

"No, no, it won't do, I tell you; it won't do," said Mr. Poulter,
preparing to depart. "What 'ud Mr. Stelling say to me?"

"Oh, I say, do, Mr. Poulter! I'd give you my five-shilling piece if
you'd let me keep the sword a week. Look here!" said Tom, reaching out
the attractively large round of silver. The young dog calculated the
effect as well as if he had been a philosopher.

"Well," said Mr. Poulter, with still deeper gravity, "you must keep it
out of sight, you know."

"Oh yes, I'll keep it under the bed," said Tom, eagerly, "or else at
the bottom of my large box."

"And let me see, now, whether you can draw it out of the sheath
without hurting yourself." That process having been gone through more
than once, Mr. Poulter felt that he had acted with scrupulous
conscientiousness, and said, "Well, now, Master Tulliver, if I take
the crown-piece, it is to make sure as you'll do no mischief with the
sword."

"Oh no, indeed, Mr. Poulter," said Tom, delightedly handing him the
crown-piece, and grasping the sword, which, he thought, might have
been lighter with advantage.

"But if Mr. Stelling catches you carrying it in?" said Mr. Poulter,
pocketing the crown-piece provisionally while he raised this new
doubt.

"Oh, he always keeps in his upstairs study on Saturday afternoon,"
said Tom, who disliked anything sneaking, but was not disinclined to a
little stratagem in a worthy cause. So he carried off the sword in
triumph mixed with dread--dread that he might encounter Mr. or Mrs.
Stelling--to his bedroom, where, after some consideration, he hid it
in the closet behind some hanging clothes. That night he fell asleep
in the thought that he would astonish Maggie with it when she
came,--tie it round his waist with his red comforter, and make her
believe that the sword was his own, and that he was going to be a
soldier. There was nobody but Maggie who would be silly enough to
believe him, or whom he dared allow to know he had a sword; and Maggie
was really coming next week to see Tom, before she went to a
boarding-school with Lucy.

If you think a lad of thirteen would have been so childish, you must
be an exceptionally wise man, who, although you are devoted to a civil
calling, requiring you to look bland rather than formidable, yet
never, since you had a beard, threw yourself into a martial attitude,
and frowned before the looking-glass. It is doubtful whether our
soldiers would be maintained if there were not pacific people at home
who like to fancy themselves soldiers. War, like other dramatic
spectacles, might possibly cease for want of a "public."

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Tom and Philip never really bond as the weeks go by, since they have very different personalities. Philip is pretty moody and sensitive and Tom tends to bluster about and offend Philip without really meaning to do so. Tom starts taking drawing lessons and is bummed since he is only allowed to draw nature scenes and and other stuff that he considers boring. The narrator gives us a lengthy run down about the state of education in this period. Education was basically a crapshoot and people were really lucky to get a decent or a useful one. Tom was clearly not so lucky. Mr. Stelling continues to think that Tom is a moron and sticks to his ineffectual method of teaching since he doesn't know any other way to do it. But luckily Philip takes some of the pressure off of Tom and Mr. Stelling is distracted by his one smart pupil. With Philip's help, Tom does pick up some things and starts maturing too. Tom befriends a local named Mr. Poulter, who was a soldier back in the day. Mr. Poulter criticizes the whole of military history and tells Tom stories about his own battle exploits. Mr. Poulter also shows Tom his sword and Tom is duly impressed. Mr. Poulter agrees to show Tom some battle drills and Tom runs off to get Philip. Tom bursts in and interrupts Philip while he's playing the piano. Philip is annoyed and snaps at Tom. We learn that Philip doesn't like Mr. Poulter, who is often rude to him. Tom gets mad in return and yells at Philip and calls him a girl and insults his father. Ouch. Tom storms back out and Mrs. Stelling comes in to check on Philip, who is crying. Philip lies and says that he has a toothache and that's why he is upset. Tom meanwhile goes back out to watch Mr. Poulter. He begs Mr. Poulter to let him keep his sword for a few days and, responsible adult that he is, Mr. Poulter agrees. Tom hides the sword in his room and is excited to show it to Maggie, who is coming to visit again next week before going off to a boarding school with Lucy.


prompt:
Chapter: Maggie's Second Visit

This last breach between the two lads was not readily mended, and for
some time they spoke to each other no more than was necessary. Their
natural antipathy of temperament made resentment an easy passage to
hatred, and in Philip the transition seemed to have begun; there was
no malignity in his disposition, but there was a susceptibility that
made him peculiarly liable to a strong sense of repulsion. The ox--we
may venture to assert it on the authority of a great classic--is not
given to use his teeth as an instrument of attack, and Tom was an
excellent bovine lad, who ran at questionable objects in a truly
ingenious bovine manner; but he had blundered on Philip's tenderest
point, and had caused him as much acute pain as if he had studied the
means with the nicest precision and the most envenomed spite. Tom saw
no reason why they should not make up this quarrel as they had done
many others, by behaving as if nothing had happened; for though he had
never before said to Philip that his father was a rogue, this idea had
so habitually made part of his feeling as to the relation between
himself and his dubious schoolfellow, who he could neither like nor
dislike, that the mere utterance did not make such an epoch to him as
it did to Philip. And he had a right to say so when Philip hectored
over _him_, and called him names. But perceiving that his first
advances toward amity were not met, he relapsed into his least
favorable disposition toward Philip, and resolved never to appeal to
him either about drawing or exercise again. They were only so far
civil to each other as was necessary to prevent their state of feud
from being observed by Mr. Stelling, who would have "put down" such
nonsense with great vigor.

When Maggie came, however, she could not help looking with growing
interest at the new schoolfellow, although he was the son of that
wicked Lawyer Wakem, who made her father so angry. She had arrived in
the middle of school-hours, and had sat by while Philip went through
his lessons with Mr. Stelling. Tom, some weeks ago, had sent her word
that Philip knew no end of stories,--not stupid stories like hers; and
she was convinced now from her own observation that he must be very
clever; she hoped he would think _her_ rather clever too, when she
came to talk to him. Maggie, moreover, had rather a tenderness for
deformed things; she preferred the wry-necked lambs, because it seemed
to her that the lambs which were quite strong and well made wouldn't
mind so much about being petted; and she was especially fond of
petting objects that would think it very delightful to be petted by
her. She loved Tom very dearly, but she often wished that he _cared_
more about her loving him.

"I think Philip Wakem seems a nice boy, Tom," she said, when they went
out of the study together into the garden, to pass the interval before
dinner. "He couldn't choose his father, you know; and I've read of
very bad men who had good sons, as well as good parents who had bad
children. And if Philip is good, I think we ought to be the more sorry
for him because his father is not a good man. _You_ like him, don't
you?"

"Oh, he's a queer fellow," said Tom, curtly, "and he's as sulky as can
be with me, because I told him his father was a rogue. And I'd a right
to tell him so, for it was true; and _he_ began it, with calling me
names. But you stop here by yourself a bit, Maggie, will you? I've got
something I want to do upstairs."

"Can't I go too?" said Maggie, who in this first day of meeting again
loved Tom's shadow.

"No, it's something I'll tell you about by-and-by, not yet," said Tom,
skipping away.

In the afternoon the boys were at their books in the study, preparing
the morrow's lesson's that they might have a holiday in the evening in
honor of Maggie's arrival. Tom was hanging over his Latin grammar,
moving his lips inaudibly like a strict but impatient Catholic
repeating his tale of paternosters; and Philip, at the other end of
the room, was busy with two volumes, with a look of contented
diligence that excited Maggie's curiosity; he did not look at all as
if he were learning a lesson. She sat on a low stool at nearly a right
angle with the two boys, watching first one and then the other; and
Philip, looking off his book once toward the fire-place, caught the
pair of questioning dark eyes fixed upon him. He thought this sister
of Tulliver's seemed a nice little thing, quite unlike her brother; he
wished _he_ had a little sister. What was it, he wondered, that made
Maggie's dark eyes remind him of the stories about princesses being
turned into animals? I think it was that her eyes were full of
unsatisfied intelligence, and unsatisfied beseeching affection.

"I say, Magsie," said Tom at last, shutting his books and putting them
away with the energy and decision of a perfect master in the art of
leaving off, "I've done my lessons now. Come upstairs with me."

"What is it?" said Maggie, when they were outside the door, a slight
suspicion crossing her mind as she remembered Tom's preliminary visit
upstairs. "It isn't a trick you're going to play me, now?"

"No, no, Maggie," said Tom, in his most coaxing tone; "It's something
you'll like _ever so_."

He put his arm round her neck, and she put hers round his waist, and
twined together in this way, they went upstairs.

"I say, Magsie, you must not tell anybody, you know," said Tom, "else
I shall get fifty lines."

"Is it alive?" said Maggie, whose imagination had settled for the
moment on the idea that Tom kept a ferret clandestinely.

"Oh, I sha'n't tell you," said he. "Now you go into that corner and
hide your face, while I reach it out," he added, as he locked the
bedroom door behind them. "I'll tell you when to turn round. You
mustn't squeal out, you know."

"Oh, but if you frighten me, I shall," said Maggie, beginning to look
rather serious.

"You won't be frightened, you silly thing," said Tom. "Go and hide
your face, and mind you don't peep."

"Of course I sha'n't peep," said Maggie, disdainfully; and she buried
her face in the pillow like a person of strict honor.

But Tom looked round warily as he walked to the closet; then he
stepped into the narrow space, and almost closed the door. Maggie kept
her face buried without the aid of principle, for in that
dream-suggestive attitude she had soon forgotten where she was, and
her thoughts were busy with the poor deformed boy, who was so clever,
when Tom called out, "Now then, Magsie!"

Nothing but long meditation and preconcerted arrangement of effects
would have enabled Tom to present so striking a figure as he did to
Maggie when she looked up. Dissatisfied with the pacific aspect of a
face which had no more than the faintest hint of flaxen eyebrow,
together with a pair of amiable blue-gray eyes and round pink cheeks
that refused to look formidable, let him frown as he would before the
looking-glass (Philip had once told him of a man who had a horseshoe
frown, and Tom had tried with all his frowning might to make a
horseshoe on his forehead), he had had recourse to that unfailing
source of the terrible, burnt cork, and had made himself a pair of
black eyebrows that met in a satisfactory manner over his nose, and
were matched by a less carefully adjusted blackness about the chin. He
had wound a red handkerchief round his cloth cap to give it the air of
a turban, and his red comforter across his breast as a scarf,--an
amount of red which, with the tremendous frown on his brow, and the
decision with which he grasped the sword, as he held it with its point
resting on the ground, would suffice to convey an approximate idea of
his fierce and bloodthirsty disposition.

Maggie looked bewildered for a moment, and Tom enjoyed that moment
keenly; but in the next she laughed, clapped her hands together, and
said, "Oh, Tom, you've made yourself like Bluebeard at the show."

It was clear she had not been struck with the presence of the
sword,--it was not unsheathed. Her frivolous mind required a more
direct appeal to its sense of the terrible, and Tom prepared for his
master-stroke. Frowning with a double amount of intention, if not of
corrugation, he (carefully) drew the sword from its sheath, and
pointed it at Maggie.

"Oh, Tom, please don't!" exclaimed Maggie, in a tone of suppressed
dread, shrinking away from him into the opposite corner. "I _shall_
scream--I'm sure I shall! Oh, don't I wish I'd never come upstairs!"

The corners of Tom's mouth showed an inclination to a smile of
complacency that was immediately checked as inconsistent with the
severity of a great warrior. Slowly he let down the scabbard on the
floor, lest it should make too much noise, and then said sternly,--

"I'm the Duke of Wellington! March!" stamping forward with the right
leg a little bent, and the sword still pointing toward Maggie, who,
trembling, and with tear-filled eyes, got upon the bed, as the only
means of widening the space between them.

Tom, happy in this spectator of his military performances, even though
the spectator was only Maggie, proceeded, with the utmost exertion of
his force, to such an exhibition of the cut and thrust as would
necessarily be expected of the Duke of Wellington.

"Tom, I _will not_ bear it, I _will_ scream," said Maggie, at the
first movement of the sword. "You'll hurt yourself; you'll cut your
head off!"

"One--two," said Tom, resolutely, though at "two" his wrist trembled a
little. "Three" came more slowly, and with it the sword swung
downward, and Maggie gave a loud shriek. The sword had fallen, with
its edge on Tom's foot, and in a moment after he had fallen too.
Maggie leaped from the bed, still shrieking, and immediately there was
a rush of footsteps toward the room. Mr. Stelling, from his upstairs
study, was the first to enter. He found both the children on the
floor. Tom had fainted, and Maggie was shaking him by the collar of
his jacket, screaming, with wild eyes. She thought he was dead, poor
child! and yet she shook him, as if that would bring him back to life.
In another minute she was sobbing with joy because Tom opened his
eyes. She couldn't sorrow yet that he had hurt his foot; it seemed as
if all happiness lay in his being alive.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Tom and Philip are no longer speaking and only talk to one another when Mr. Stelling is around. Maggie shows up and Tom is glad. Maggie instantly likes Philip since she pities him. Tom runs upstairs, telling Maggie that he has a surprise for her and that he'll show it to her later that day. The boys and Maggie gather in the school room to do homework. Philip is instantly charmed by Maggie and wishes that he had a nice sister like her. Tom then drags Maggie upstairs for his big surprise. He makes Maggie close her eyes and, when she opens them, she sees Tom, dressed up with a fake mustache, holding a real sword. Tom starts swinging the sword around and Maggie freaks out and says he'll hurt himself. Maggie was right, since Tom quickly drops the swords and stabs himself in the foot. Maggie starts screaming and the whole household is in turmoil.


prompt:
Chapter: A Love-Scene

Poor Tom bore his severe pain heroically, and was resolute in not
"telling" of Mr. Poulter more than was unavoidable; the five-shilling
piece remained a secret even to Maggie. But there was a terrible dread
weighing on his mind, so terrible that he dared not even ask the
question which might bring the fatal "yes"; he dared not ask the
surgeon or Mr. Stelling, "Shall I be lame, Sir?" He mastered himself
so as not to cry out at the pain; but when his foot had been dressed,
and he was left alone with Maggie seated by his bedside, the children
sobbed together, with their heads laid on the same pillow. Tom was
thinking of himself walking about on crutches, like the wheelwright's
son; and Maggie, who did not guess what was in his mind, sobbed for
company. It had not occurred to the surgeon or to Mr. Stelling to
anticipate this dread in Tom's mind, and to reassure him by hopeful
words. But Philip watched the surgeon out of the house, and waylaid
Mr. Stelling to ask the very question that Tom had not dared to ask
for himself.

"I beg your pardon, sir,--but does Mr. Askern say Tulliver will be
lame?"

"Oh, no; oh, no," said Mr. Stelling, "not permanently; only for a
little while."

"Did he tell Tulliver so, sir, do you think?"

"No; nothing was said to him on the subject."

"Then may I go and tell him, sir?"

"Yes, to be sure; now you mention it, I dare say he may be troubling
about that. Go to his bedroom, but be very quiet at present."

It had been Philip's first thought when he heard of the
accident,--"Will Tulliver be lame? It will be very hard for him if he
is"; and Tom's hitherto unforgiven offences were washed out by that
pity. Philip felt that they were no longer in a state of repulsion,
but were being drawn into a common current of suffering and sad
privation. His imagination did not dwell on the outward calamity and
its future effect on Tom's life, but it made vividly present to him
the probable state of Tom's feeling. Philip had only lived fourteen
years, but those years had, most of them, been steeped in the sense of
a lot irremediably hard.

"Mr. Askern says you'll soon be all right again, Tulliver, did you
know?" he said rather timidly, as he stepped gently up to Tom's bed.
"I've just been to ask Mr. Stelling, and he says you'll walk as well
as ever again by-and-day."

Tom looked up with that momentary stopping of the breath which comes
with a sudden joy; then he gave a long sigh, and turned his blue-gray
eyes straight on Philip's face, as he had not done for a fortnight or
more. As for Maggie, this intimation of a possibility she had not
thought of before affected her as a new trouble; the bare idea of
Tom's being always lame overpowered the assurance that such a
misfortune was not likely to befall him, and she clung to him and
cried afresh.

"Don't be a little silly, Magsie," said Tom, tenderly, feeling very
brave now. "I shall soon get well."

"Good-by, Tulliver," said Philip, putting out his small, delicate
hand, which Tom clasped immediately with his more substantial fingers.

"I say," said Tom, "ask Mr. Stelling to let you come and sit with me
sometimes, till I get up again, Wakem; and tell me about Robert Bruce,
you know."

After that, Philip spent all his time out of school-hours with Tom and
Maggie. Tom liked to hear fighting stories as much as ever, but he
insisted strongly on the fact that those great fighters who did so
many wonderful things and came off unhurt, wore excellent armor from
head to foot, which made fighting easy work, he considered. He should
not have hurt his foot if he had had an iron shoe on. He listened with
great interest to a new story of Philip's about a man who had a very
bad wound in his foot, and cried out so dreadfully with the pain that
his friends could bear with him no longer, but put him ashore on a
desert island, with nothing but some wonderful poisoned arrows to kill
animals with for food.

"I didn't roar out a bit, you know," Tom said, "and I dare say my foot
was as bad as his. It's cowardly to roar."

But Maggie would have it that when anything hurt you very much, it was
quite permissible to cry out, and it was cruel of people not to bear
it. She wanted to know if Philoctetes had a sister, and why _she_
didn't go with him on the desert island and take care of him.

One day, soon after Philip had told this story, he and Maggie were in
the study alone together while Tom's foot was being dressed. Philip
was at his books, and Maggie, after sauntering idly round the room,
not caring to do anything in particular, because she would soon go to
Tom again, went and leaned on the table near Philip to see what he was
doing, for they were quite old friends now, and perfectly at home with
each other.

"What are you reading about in Greek?" she said. "It's poetry, I can
see that, because the lines are so short."

"It's about Philoctetes, the lame man I was telling you of yesterday,"
he answered, resting his head on his hand, and looking at her as if he
were not at all sorry to be interrupted. Maggie, in her absent way,
continued to lean forward, resting on her arms and moving her feet
about, while her dark eyes got more and more fixed and vacant, as if
she had quite forgotten Philip and his book.

"Maggie," said Philip, after a minute or two, still leaning on his
elbow and looking at her, "if you had had a brother like me, do you
think you should have loved him as well as Tom?"

Maggie started a little on being roused from her reverie, and said,
"What?" Philip repeated his question.

"Oh, yes, better," she answered immediately. "No, not better; because
I don't think I _could_ love you better than Tom. But I should be so
sorry,--_so sorry_ for you."

Philip colored; he had meant to imply, would she love him as well in
spite of his deformity, and yet when she alluded to it so plainly, he
winced under her pity. Maggie, young as she was, felt her mistake.
Hitherto she had instinctively behaved as if she were quite
unconscious of Philip's deformity; her own keen sensitiveness and
experience under family criticism sufficed to teach her this as well
as if she had been directed by the most finished breeding.

"But you are so very clever, Philip, and you can play and sing," she
added quickly. "I wish you _were_ my brother. I'm very fond of you.
And you would stay at home with me when Tom went out, and you would
teach me everything; wouldn't you,--Greek and everything?"

"But you'll go away soon, and go to school, Maggie," said Philip, "and
then you'll forget all about me, and not care for me any more. And
then I shall see you when you're grown up, and you'll hardly take any
notice of me."

"Oh, no, I sha'n't forget you, I'm sure," said Maggie, shaking her
head very seriously. "I never forget anything, and I think about
everybody when I'm away from them. I think about poor Yap; he's got a
lump in his throat, and Luke says he'll die. Only don't you tell Tom.
because it will vex him so. You never saw Yap; he's a queer little
dog,--nobody cares about him but Tom and me."

"Do you care as much about me as you do about Yap, Maggie?" said
Philip, smiling rather sadly.

"Oh, yes, I should think so," said Maggie, laughing.

"I'm very fond of _you_, Maggie; I shall never forget _you_," said
Philip, "and when I'm very unhappy, I shall always think of you, and
wish I had a sister with dark eyes, just like yours."

"Why do you like my eyes?" said Maggie, well pleased. She had never
heard any one but her father speak of her eyes as if they had merit.

"I don't know," said Philip. "They're not like any other eyes. They
seem trying to speak,--trying to speak kindly. I don't like other
people to look at me much, but I like you to look at me, Maggie."

"Why, I think you're fonder of me than Tom is," said Maggie, rather
sorrowfully. Then, wondering how she could convince Philip that she
could like him just as well, although he was crooked, she said:

"Should you like me to kiss you, as I do Tom? I will, if you like."

"Yes, very much; nobody kisses me."

Maggie put her arm round his neck and kissed him quite earnestly.

"There now," she said, "I shall always remember you, and kiss you when
I see you again, if it's ever so long. But I'll go now, because I
think Mr. Askern's done with Tom's foot."

When their father came the second time, Maggie said to him, "Oh,
father, Philip Wakem is so very good to Tom; he is such a clever boy,
and I _do_ love him. And you love him too, Tom, don't you? _Say_ you
love him," she added entreatingly.

Tom colored a little as he looked at his father, and said: "I sha'n't
be friends with him when I leave school, father; but we've made it up
now, since my foot has been bad, and he's taught me to play at
draughts, and I can beat him."

"Well, well," said Mr. Tulliver, "if he's good to you, try and make
him amends, and be good to _him_. He's a poor crooked creature, and
takes after his dead mother. But don't you be getting too thick with
him; he's got his father's blood in him too. Ay, ay, the gray colt may
chance to kick like his black sire."

The jarring natures of the two boys effected what Mr. Tulliver's
admonition alone might have failed to effect; in spite of Philip's new
kindness, and Tom's answering regard in this time of his trouble, they
never became close friends. When Maggie was gone, and when Tom
by-and-by began to walk about as usual, the friendly warmth that had
been kindled by pity and gratitude died out by degrees, and left them
in their old relation to each other. Philip was often peevish and
contemptuous; and Tom's more specific and kindly impressions gradually
melted into the old background of suspicion and dislike toward him as
a queer fellow, a humpback, and the son of a rogue. If boys and men
are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must
be made of metal that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when
the heat dies out.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Tom is terribly worried that he will be lame, or have a limp, for the rest of his life. Mr. Stelling doesn't think to reassure Tom, but luckily Philip asks about it and goes to tell Tom the good news: he won't have a permanent injury. Tom and Philip reconcile and Philip hangs out with Tom and Maggie, telling them fun stories and Greek myths. A few days later Maggie and Philip are alone in the school room. Philip asks Maggie if she could love a brother like him and Maggie says yes, but that she'd love Tom best still. But she'd feel sorry for a deformed brother. This makes Philip uncomfortable and Maggie quickly assures Philip that she thinks he's very smart and likes him a lot. Maggie also assures Philip she won't forget him when she goes away and Philip says he'll always remember her. He wishes he had a sister like her. Philip tells Maggie that he likes her eyes and Maggie is surprised to note that Philip seems to like her better than Tom. Maggie gives Philip a kiss on the cheek. When Mr. Tulliver comes to fetch Maggie, she praises Philip to him. Mr. Tulliver tells Tom not to get overly friendly with Philip, since he is a Wakem. Once Tom gets better, the two boys grow apart again due to their differing personalities.


prompt:
Chapter: The Golden Gates Are Passed

So Tom went on even to the fifth half-year--till he was turned
sixteen--at King's Lorton, while Maggie was growing with a rapidity
which her aunts considered highly reprehensible, at Miss Firniss's
boarding-school in the ancient town of Laceham on the Floss, with
cousin Lucy for her companion. In her early letters to Tom she had
always sent her love to Philip, and asked many questions about him,
which were answered by brief sentences about Tom's toothache, and a
turf-house which he was helping to build in the garden, with other
items of that kind. She was pained to hear Tom say in the holidays
that Philip was as queer as ever again, and often cross. They were no
longer very good friends, she perceived; and when she reminded Tom
that he ought always to love Philip for being so good to him when his
foot was bad, he answered: "Well, it isn't my fault; _I_ don't do
anything to him." She hardly ever saw Philip during the remainder of
their school-life; in the Midsummer holidays he was always away at the
seaside, and at Christmas she could only meet him at long intervals in
the street of St. Ogg's. When they did meet, she remembered her
promise to kiss him, but, as a young lady who had been at a
boarding-school, she knew now that such a greeting was out of the
question, and Philip would not expect it. The promise was void, like
so many other sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as
promises made in Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the
starry blossoms grew side by side with the ripening peach,--impossible
to be fulfilled when the golden gates had been passed.

But when their father was actually engaged in the long-threatened
lawsuit, and Wakem, as the agent at once of Pivart and Old Harry, was
acting against him, even Maggie felt, with some sadness, that they
were not likely ever to have any intimacy with Philip again; the very
name of Wakem made her father angry, and she had once heard him say
that if that crook-backed son lived to inherit his father's ill-gotten
gains, there would be a curse upon him. "Have as little to do with him
at school as you can, my lad," he said to Tom; and the command was
obeyed the more easily because Mr. Sterling by this time had two
additional pupils; for though this gentleman's rise in the world was
not of that meteor-like rapidity which the admirers of his
extemporaneous eloquence had expected for a preacher whose voice
demanded so wide a sphere, he had yet enough of growing prosperity to
enable him to increase his expenditure in continued disproportion to
his income.

As for Tom's school course, it went on with mill-like monotony, his
mind continuing to move with a slow, half-stifled pulse in a medium
uninteresting or unintelligible ideas. But each vacation he brought
home larger and larger drawings with the satiny rendering of
landscape, and water-colors in vivid greens, together with manuscript
books full of exercises and problems, in which the handwriting was all
the finer because he gave his whole mind to it. Each vacation he
brought home a new book or two, indicating his progress through
different stages of history, Christian doctrine, and Latin literature;
and that passage was not entirely without results, besides the
possession of the books. Tom's ear and tongue had become accustomed to
a great many words and phrases which are understood to be signs of an
educated condition; and though he had never really applied his mind to
any one of his lessons, the lessons had left a deposit of vague,
fragmentary, ineffectual notions. Mr. Tulliver, seeing signs of
acquirement beyond the reach of his own criticism, thought it was
probably all right with Tom's education; he observed, indeed, that
there were no maps, and not enough "summing"; but he made no formal
complaint to Mr. Stelling. It was a puzzling business, this schooling;
and if he took Tom away, where could he send him with better effect?

By the time Tom had reached his last quarter at King's Lorton, the
years had made striking changes in him since the day we saw him
returning from Mr. Jacobs's academy. He was a tall youth now, carrying
himself without the least awkwardness, and speaking without more
shyness than was a becoming symptom of blended diffidence and pride;
he wore his tail-coat and his stand-up collars, and watched the down
on his lip with eager impatience, looking every day at his virgin
razor, with which he had provided himself in the last holidays. Philip
had already left,--at the autumn quarter,--that he might go to the
south for the winter, for the sake of his health; and this change
helped to give Tom the unsettled, exultant feeling that usually
belongs to the last months before leaving school. This quarter, too,
there was some hope of his father's lawsuit being decided; _that_ made
the prospect of home more entirely pleasurable. For Tom, who had
gathered his view of the case from his father's conversation, had no
doubt that Pivart would be beaten.

Tom had not heard anything from home for some weeks,--a fact which did
not surprise him, for his father and mother were not apt to manifest
their affection in unnecessary letters,--when, to his great surprise,
on the morning of a dark, cold day near the end of November, he was
told, soon after entering the study at nine o'clock, that his sister
was in the drawing-room. It was Mrs. Stelling who had come into the
study to tell him, and she left him to enter the drawing-room alone.

Maggie, too, was tall now, with braided and coiled hair; she was
almost as tall as Tom, though she was only thirteen; and she really
looked older than he did at that moment. She had thrown off her
bonnet, her heavy braids were pushed back from her forehead, as if it
would not bear that extra load, and her young face had a strangely
worn look, as her eyes turned anxiously toward the door. When Tom
entered she did not speak, but only went up to him, put her arms round
his neck, and kissed him earnestly. He was used to various moods of
hers, and felt no alarm at the unusual seriousness of her greeting.

"Why, how is it you're come so early this cold morning, Maggie? Did
you come in the gig?" said Tom, as she backed toward the sofa, and
drew him to her side.

"No, I came by the coach. I've walked from the turnpike."

"But how is it you're not at school? The holidays have not begun yet?"

"Father wanted me at home," said Maggie, with a slight trembling of
the lip. "I came home three or four days ago."

"Isn't my father well?" said Tom, rather anxiously.

"Not quite," said Maggie. "He's very unhappy, Tom. The lawsuit is
ended, and I came to tell you because I thought it would be better for
you to know it before you came home, and I didn't like only to send
you a letter."

"My father hasn't lost?" said Tom, hastily, springing from the sofa,
and standing before Maggie with his hands suddenly thrust into his
pockets.

"Yes, dear Tom," said Maggie, looking up at him with trembling.

Tom was silent a minute or two, with his eyes fixed on the floor. Then
he said:

"My father will have to pay a good deal of money, then?"

"Yes," said Maggie, rather faintly.

"Well, it can't be helped," said Tom, bravely, not translating the
loss of a large sum of money into any tangible results. "But my
father's very much vexed, I dare say?" he added, looking at Maggie,
and thinking that her agitated face was only part of her girlish way
of taking things.

"Yes," said Maggie, again faintly. Then, urged to fuller speech by
Tom's freedom from apprehension, she said loudly and rapidly, as if
the words _would_ burst from her: "Oh, Tom, he will lose the mill and
the land and everything; he will have nothing left."

Tom's eyes flashed out one look of surprise at her, before he turned
pale, and trembled visibly. He said nothing, but sat down on the sofa
again, looking vaguely out of the opposite window.

Anxiety about the future had never entered Tom's mind. His father had
always ridden a good horse, kept a good house, and had the cheerful,
confident air of a man who has plenty of property to fall back upon.
Tom had never dreamed that his father would "fail"; _that_ was a form
of misfortune which he had always heard spoken of as a deep disgrace,
and disgrace was an idea that he could not associate with any of his
relations, least of all with his father. A proud sense of family
respectability was part of the very air Tom had been born and brought
up in. He knew there were people in St. Ogg's who made a show without
money to support it, and he had always heard such people spoken of by
his own friends with contempt and reprobation. He had a strong belief,
which was a lifelong habit, and required no definite evidence to rest
on, that his father could spend a great deal of money if he chose; and
since his education at Mr. Stelling's had given him a more expensive
view of life, he had often thought that when he got older he would
make a figure in the world, with his horse and dogs and saddle, and
other accoutrements of a fine young man, and show himself equal to any
of his contemporaries at St. Ogg's, who might consider themselves a
grade above him in society because their fathers were professional
men, or had large oil-mills. As to the prognostics and headshaking of
his aunts and uncles, they had never produced the least effect on him,
except to make him think that aunts and uncles were disagreeable
society; he had heard them find fault in much the same way as long as
he could remember. His father knew better than they did.

The down had come on Tom's lip, yet his thoughts and expectations had
been hitherto only the reproduction, in changed forms, of the boyish
dreams in which he had lived three years ago. He was awakened now with
a violent shock.

Maggie was frightened at Tom's pale, trembling silence. There was
something else to tell him,--something worse. She threw her arms round
him at last, and said, with a half sob:

"Oh, Tom--dear, dear Tom, don't fret too much; try and bear it well."

Tom turned his cheek passively to meet her entreating kisses, and
there gathered a moisture in his eyes, which he just rubbed away with
his hand. The action seemed to rouse him, for he shook himself and
said: "I shall go home, with you, Maggie. Didn't my father say I was
to go?"

"No, Tom, father didn't wish it," said Maggie, her anxiety about _his_
feeling helping her to master her agitation. What _would_ he do when
she told him all? "But mother wants you to come,--poor mother!--she
cries so. Oh, Tom, it's very dreadful at home."

Maggie's lips grew whiter, and she began to tremble almost as Tom had
done. The two poor things clung closer to each other, both
trembling,--the one at an unshapen fear, the other at the image of a
terrible certainty. When Maggie spoke, it was hardly above a whisper.

"And--and--poor father----"

Maggie could not utter it. But the suspense was intolerable to Tom. A
vague idea of going to prison, as a consequence of debt, was the shape
his fears had begun to take.

"Where's my father?" he said impatiently. "_Tell_ me, Maggie."

"He's at home," said Maggie, finding it easier to reply to that
question. "But," she added, after a pause, "not himself--he fell off
his horse. He has known nobody but me ever since--he seems to have
lost his senses. O father, father----"

With these last words, Maggie's sobs burst forth with the more
violence for the previous struggle against them. Tom felt that
pressure of the heart which forbids tears; he had no distinct vision
of their troubles as Maggie had, who had been at home; he only felt
the crushing weight of what seemed unmitigated misfortune. He
tightened his arm almost convulsively round Maggie as she sobbed, but
his face looked rigid and tearless, his eyes blank,--as if a black
curtain of cloud had suddenly fallen on his path.

But Maggie soon checked herself abruptly; a single thought had acted
on her like a startling sound.

"We must set out, Tom, we must not stay. Father will miss me; we must
be at the turnpike at ten to meet the coach." She said this with hasty
decision, rubbing her eyes, and rising to seize her bonnet.

Tom at once felt the same impulse, and rose too. "Wait a minute,
Maggie," he said. "I must speak to Mr. Stelling, and then we'll go."

He thought he must go to the study where the pupils were; but on his
way he met Mr. Stelling, who had heard from his wife that Maggie
appeared to be in trouble when she asked for her brother, and now that
he thought the brother and sister had been alone long enough, was
coming to inquire and offer his sympathy.

"Please, sir, I must go home," Tom said abruptly, as he met Mr.
Stelling in the passage. "I must go back with my sister directly. My
father's lost his lawsuit--he's lost all his property--and he's very
ill."

Mr. Stelling felt like a kind-hearted man; he foresaw a probable money
loss for himself, but this had no appreciable share in his feeling,
while he looked with grave pity at the brother and sister for whom
youth and sorrow had begun together. When he knew how Maggie had come,
and how eager she was to get home again, he hurried their departure,
only whispering something to Mrs. Stelling, who had followed him, and
who immediately left the room.

Tom and Maggie were standing on the door-step, ready to set out, when
Mrs. Stelling came with a little basket, which she hung on Maggie's
arm, saying: "Do remember to eat something on the way, dear." Maggie's
heart went out toward this woman whom she had never liked, and she
kissed her silently. It was the first sign within the poor child of
that new sense which is the gift of sorrow,--that susceptibility to
the bare offices of humanity which raises them into a bond of loving
fellowship, as to haggard men among the ice-bergs the mere presence of
an ordinary comrade stirs the deep fountains of affection.

Mr. Stelling put his hand on Tom's shoulder and said: "God bless you,
my boy; let me know how you get on." Then he pressed Maggie's hand;
but there were no audible good-byes. Tom had so often thought how
joyful he should be the day he left school "for good"! And now his
school years seemed like a holiday that had come to an end.

The two slight youthful figures soon grew indistinct on the distant
road,--were soon lost behind the projecting hedgerow.

They had gone forth together into their life of sorrow, and they would
never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had
entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood
had forever closed behind them.

Book III

_The Downfall_

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: We jump forward in time - Tom is now sixteen and has been studying all the while at Mr. Stelling's. Tom and Philip never recover their temporary friendship and Maggie rarely sees Philip anymore. Mr. Tulliver is now engaged in his lawsuit with Mr. Privart and Mr. Wakem, and Maggie is sad that this probably means the end of her relationship with Philip. Despite his rather ineffectual education, Tom is now a self-confident young man who is looking forward to finishing school. He is confident that his father's lawsuit will be settled soon. One day Maggie, now thirteen, shows up unexpectedly. Maggie has awful news: their father has lost his lawsuit and the family is now financially ruined. Tom is horrified and is suddenly thrust into the adult world without warning. To make matters worse, their father is very ill and seems to have lost his mind - he doesn't recognize anyone and is really out of it. Tom quickly goes to tell Mr. Stelling the news and the two Tulliver siblings head back home. The narrator closes the chapter by lamenting the loss of Tom and Maggie's childhood innocence and hints that their lives are going to get much worse in the future.