every hour
with waiting claims, each to my ardour more instant and peremptory
than its fellow.

Rhapsodies have been penned about the simple candour of children, the
unmeasured frankness of boys. These qualities were not, I think,
conspicuous in me. At least, I recall a considerable amount of
play-acting in my life on board the _Ariadne_, and, I think, in even
earlier phases. As a boy, it seems to me, I had a very keen appetite
for affection. I was somewhat emotional and sentimental, and always
interested in producing an impression upon the minds of those about
me. Without reaching the point of seeing life as a spectacle, I
believe my own small personality presented a spectacle of which I was
pretty generally and interestedly conscious. There was a good deal of
drama for me, in my own insignificant progress. I often watched
myself, and strove to gauge the impression I produced on others, and
to mould and shape this to my fancy. There may possibly be something
unpleasant, even unnatural about this, in so young a boy. I do not
know, but I am sure it is true; and so it is rightly set down here.

There was a Mrs. Armstrong among our passengers, who was accompanied
by two daughters; a bonny, romping girl of sixteen, in whom I felt
little or no interest, and a serious young woman of two or
three-and-twenty, with whom I fell in love in an absurdly solemn fashion.
Miss Armstrong had a great deal of shining fair hair, a good figure, and
pleasing dark blue eyes. That is as far as memory carries me regarding
her appearance. She rather took me up, as she might have taken up
crewel work, whatever that may be, or district visiting, or what not.
No doubt she was among the majority in whom my father inspired
interest. She talked to me in an exemplary way, and held up before me,
as I remember it, a sort of blend of little Lord Fauntleroy and the
dreadful child in _East Lynne_, as an ideal to strive after.

She assuredly meant most kindly by me, but the influence was not,
perhaps, very wholesome; or, it may be, I twisted and perverted it to
ill uses. At least, I remember devious ways in which I sought to earn
her admiration, and other yet more devious ways in which I schemed to
win petting from her. I actually used to invent small offences and
weave circumstantial romances about pretended wrong-doings, in order
to have the pleasure of confessing, with mock shame, and getting
absolution, along with caresses and sentimental promises of