Fifteen years of adventure had hardened into wrought metal a character never very ductile.  Tom was now, in his own way, an altogether accomplished man of the world, who knew (at least in all companies and places where he was likely to find himself) exactly what to say, to do, to make, to seek, and to avoid.  Shifty and thrifty as old Greek, or modern Scot, there were few things he could not invent, and perhaps nothing he could not endure.  He had watched human nature under every disguise, from the pomp of the ambassador to the war-paint of the savage, and formed his own clear, hard, shallow, practical estimate thereof.  He looked on it as his raw material, which he had to work up into subsistence and comfort for himself.  He did not wish to live on men, but live by them he must; and for that purpose he must study them, and especially their weaknesses.  He would not cheat them; for there was in him an innate vein of honesty, so surly and explosive, at times, as to give him much trouble.  The severest part of his self-education had been the repression of his dangerous inclination to call a sham a sham on the spot, and to answer fools according to their folly.  That youthful rashness, however, was now well-nigh subdued, and Tom could flatter and bully also, when it served his turn—­as who cannot?  Let him that is without sin among my readers, cast the first stone.  Self-conscious he was, therefore, in every word and action; not from morbid vanity, but a necessary consequence of his mode of life.  He had to use men, and therefore to watch how he used them; to watch every word, gesture, tone of voice, and, in all times and places, do the fitting thing.  It was hard work:  but necessary for a man who stood alone and self-poised in the midst of the universe; fashioning for himself everywhere, just as far as his arm could reach, some not intolerable condition; depending on nothing but himself, and caring for little but himself and the father whom, to do him justice, he never forgot.  If I wished to define Tom Thurnall by one epithet, I should call him specially an ungodly man—­were it not that scriptural epithets have, now-a-days, such altogether conventional and official meanings, that one fears to convey, in using them, some notion quite foreign to the truth.  Tom was certainly not one of those ungodly whom David had to deal with of old, who robbed the widow, and put the fatherless to death.  His morality was as high as that of the average; his sense of honour far higher.  He was generous and kind-hearted.  No one ever heard him tell a lie; and he had a blunt honesty about him, half real, because he liked to be honest, and yet half affected too, because he found it pay in the long run, and because it threw off their guard the people whom he intended to make his tools.  But of godliness in its true sense—­of belief that any Being above cared for him, and was helping him in the daily business of life—­that it was worth while asking that Being’s advice,