All the more striking characteristics of my nature were changed by my accident. I had suffered much in body and in mind, and had been refined by the torture to a point which made me effeminate, since an almost painful capacity for sympathy, an overwhelming dread of inflicting suffering, and a somewhat morbid self-depreciation are qualities scarcely masculine. My early ambition had been for a hard place in the world, where the world's work would force me to give hard knocks before I reached success. But now I shrank from the jostle and bustle and harsh competitions of real life; and as both my mother and Mr. Floyd wished nothing so much as that I should be guarded from all effort and fatigue at this epoch, everything conspired to unfit me for an active career, and to make me a mere looker-on--not a worker, but a musing, disappointed spectator. But when I was about eighteen I returned and entered the junior year at college with Jack Holt and Harry Dart. I had felt some pride in keeping up with them, and had enjoyed the advantage in Jamaica of the society of an Oxford graduate who was coaching the two sons of a wealthy planter to fit them to enter an English university. I read with him, and was well able to pass my examination. What it was for me to resume my old familiar intercourse with Holt and Dart I could never write down here. My two years in the tropics had not been joyless--indeed, considering all things, they had been singularly happy years--still, I had felt like a child shut out from the sunshiny place where his mates are playing. I had become patient, contemplative and resigned, and in study and in studious observation of Nature in her rarest beauty and most mighty and invincible development I had almost forgotten the deliciousness of a selfish and individual hope, the pleasures of happy and careless youth.