“And when at length, heartsore and headsore, with my scalp well rolled, I got to the gate, all my terror came to a culmination as the sentinel stopped his marching, drew himself up, and, looking through me, smiled. I expected him to say: ‘O you little thievish devil, do you think I do not see through you?’ But, bless his heart! he only said: ‘Pass!’ He did not say it twice. I walked a few steps farther, and then, having great faith in the bravery of my feet, I pulled my hat off before me, and, carrying it in that position, I whipped around the first corner and made for the bridge with a speed which Flora Temple would envy. “When I reached home I had nothing to do with my shot. I did not dare show it in the house nor tell where I got it; and after one or two solitary rolls I gave it away on the same day to a Prince-Streeter. “But, after all, that six-pounder rolled a good deal of sense into my skull. I think it was the last thing I ever stole (excepting a little matter of a heart now and then), and it gave me a notion of the folly of coveting more than you can enjoy, which has made my whole life happier. It was rather a severe mode of catechising, but ethics rubbed in with a six-pound shot are better than none at all.” His student life, which had been such a failure heretofore, was improved a little, and but a little. By means of the pressure of school discipline, backed up and made formidable by family pride and the advice and exhortations heard at home, he managed to make fair progress in most of his studies, especially in the rules and exceptions of the Latin grammar, and to the day of his death was able to establish his claims to proficiency in that language by rattling off the list of eleven prepositions that govern the ablative. But his heart was not in the work. Disgust, insurrection, revolution, was the stormy way along which he was rapidly travelling. This period in his own life is described in “Norwood”: “Long before the Amazon reaches the ocean it has grown so wide that from the channel no shore can be seen from either side. It is still a river, but with all the signs and symptoms of becoming an ocean. There is a period, beginning not far from fourteen, in young lives, when childhood is widened suddenly, and carries its banks so far out that manhood seems begun, though as yet it is far off. The stream is ocean-deep. Upon this estuary of youth the currents are shifting, the eddies are many. Here are united the strength of the sea and the hindrances of the land.