Still the old curly head and bright eyes.

He _was_ noticed occasionally to stroke his chin abstractedly; and some envious detractors went so far as to rumour that, in the lowest recesses of his trunk he had a razor, wherewith on divers occasions, in dread secret, he operated with slashing effect.

Be this as it might, Charlie was growing up.

He had a fag of his own, who alternately quaked and rejoiced beneath his eye; he wore a fearful and wonderful stick-up collar on Sundays, and, above all, he treated me with a careless indifference which contrasted wonderfully with his former enthusiasm, and betokened only too significantly the advance of years on his young head.
True, he wound me up regularly; but he often left me half the day under his pillow; and though once in a fit of artistic zeal he set himself to hew out a C.N.in startling characters on my back, with the point of a bodkin, he never polished me now as he was once wont to do.
All this was painful to me, especially the operation with the bodkin, but I still rejoiced to call him master, and to know that though years had changed his looks, and sobered his childish exuberance, the same true heart still beat close to mine, and remained still as warm and guileless as when little Charlie Newcome, with me in his pocket, first put his foot forth into the world.
There were two besides myself who could bear witness at the end of these three years that time had not changed the boy's heart.

These two, I need hardly say, were Tom Drift and Jim Halliday.
To Tom, Charlie had become increasingly a friend of the true kind.