smart, bold, dashing, reckless demeanour, a kind
of modern edition of the swashbucklers of the Stuart regime; and they
did their best to live up to that idea. This sort of thing was quite
new to me; for you must remember that I was fresh from school at the
time, and had never seen anything of the kind before, my father being an
exceptionally quiet and sober-minded individual, associating only with
men of similar temperament to himself. With my new companions, however,
`respectability' was voted old-fashioned and out of date, sobriety of
conduct a bore. They were fine, dashing, high-spirited young fellows,
fearing nothing and nobody, and they didn't care who knew it. They
drank freely, constituted themselves authorities on all kinds of sport,
gambled, and did many other things that at first distinctly frightened
me, but which, a little later on, I rather admired, and--like the young
fool that I was--soon began to humbly emulate. _Facilis descensus
Averni_! The reverence for truth, and purity, and uprightness that had
come to me in the atmosphere of home soon died. I recognised that those
virtues belonged to a bygone period, but I was going to be up-to-date,
in the forefront: nobody should surpass me! I dare say--ay, and I very
fervently hope--that all this sounds the most incredible folly to you;
but I give you my word that, so imperceptible were the steps by which I
descended the down-grade that, looking back upon it all, I am even now
not astonished at what I did. I believe that it was inevitable, under
the circumstances, for, mark you this, I had never been warned against
it! My parents had such implicit faith in me that the possibility of
such a warning being necessary never occurred to them! Of course there
could only be one end to this sort of thing, and in two years it came.
Two years sufficed to convert me, from such a lad as you are now, into
an utterly worthless, disreputable blackguard, a confirmed drunkard, a
hardened liar, and--a contemptible thief! With my constitution
completely shattered, I was obliged to resign my post, to avoid being
kicked out, and I returned home a moral and physical wreck. But, even
then, my poor father and mother had no suspicion of the truth, for I
told them that my condition was due to fever contracted in the discharge
of my duty. It was, however, impossible for me to conceal the truth
from them very long after I had once more come under their roof; and the
grief and s