unpractised youth,
To tread the rising right-hand path of truth.

Brewster.

They went home in different directions, and morally too their paths
henceforth were widely diverse. The Pythagoreans chose the letter Y as
their symbol for a good and evil life. The broad, sloping, almost
perpendicular left-hand stroke is an apt emblem for the facile downward
descent into Avernus; the precipitous and narrow right-hand stroke aptly
presents the slippery, uphillward struggle of a virtuous course I
remember to have seen, as a child, another and a similar emblem which
impressed me much. On the one side of the picture a snail was slowly
creeping up a steep path; on the other a stag rushed and bounded
unrestrained down the sheer proclivities of a wide and darkening hill.
Improvement is ever slow and difficult; degeneracy is too often
startling rapid. From henceforth, as we shall have occasion to see
hereafter, Walter was progressing from strength to strength, adding to
faith virtue, and to virtue temperance, and to temperance knowledge, and
to knowledge brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity--

"Springing from crystal step to crystal step
Of the bright air--;"

while our poor Kenrick was gradually descending deeper and deeper into
darkness and despair.

Yet he loved Walter, and sighed for the old intimacy, while he was daily
abusing his character and affecting to scorn his conduct. In short, a
change came over Kenrick. There had always been a little worm at the
root of his admiration of and affection for Walter. It was jealousy.
He did not like to hear him praised so loudly by his friends and
schoolfellows; and besides this he was vexed that Walter, Henderson, and
Power, were more closely allied to each other than to him. He had
struggled successfully against these unworthy feelings so long as Walter
was his friend, but now that he had allowed himself to seek a quarrel
with him they grew up with tremendous luxuriance. And he was so
thoroughly in the wrong, and so obstinate in persisting to misunderstand
and misrepresent his former friend, that gradually, by his pertinacity
and injustice, he alienated the regard of all those who had once been
his chosen companions. Even Whalley grew cool towards him. He had to
look elsewhere for associates, and unhappily he looked in the wrong
direction.

Meanwhile Walter, although he constantly grieved at the loss of a
friend, was otherwise very happy. The