is conduct, or to shield himself from the silent
indignation, half real and half affected, which weighed heavily against
him.

The usual consequences followed; the story of his misdoing was repeated
and believed in the least mitigated form, and this version gained
credence and currency because it was uncontradicted. The school society
bound his sin upon him; they retained it, and it was retained. It
burdened his conscience with a galling weight, because by his fellows it
remained long unforgiven. At the best, those were days of fiery trial
to that overcharged young heart. He had not only lost all immediate
influence, but as he looked forward through the vista of his
school-life, he feared that he should never entirely regain it. Even if
he should in time become a monitor, he felt as if half his authority
must be lost while this stigma was branded so deeply on his name.

Yet it was a beautiful sight to see how bravely and manfully this young
boy set himself to re-establish the reputation he had destroyed, and
since he could not "build upon the _foundations_ of yesterday," to build
upon its _ruins_; to see with what touching humility he accepted
undeserved scorn, and with what touching gratitude he hailed the
scantiest kindness; to see how he bore up unflinchingly under every
difficulty, accepted his hard position among unsympathising
schoolfellows, and made the most of it, without anger and without
complaint. He could see in after years that those days were to him a
time of unmitigated blessing. They taught him lessons of manliness, of
endurance, of humility. The necessity of repairing an error and
recovering a failure became to him a more powerful stimulus than the
hope of avoiding it altogether. The hour of punishment, which was
bitter as absinthe to his taste, became sweet as honey in his memory.
Above all, these days taught him, in a manner never to be forgotten, the
invaluable lesson that the sense of having done an ill deed is the very
heaviest calamity that an ill deed ensures, and that in life there is no
single secret of happiness comparable to the certain blessing brought
with it by a conscience void of all offence.

Perhaps the strain would have been too great for his youthful spirits,
and might have left on his character an impress of permanent melancholy,
derived from thus perpetually being reminded that he had gone wrong, but
for a school sermon which Mr Paton preached about this time, and which