He was obliged to take his own name off the books shortly afterwards, and started for the Cape, leaving Crib and Jet, the only valuable possession I imagine that he had in the world, to my brother. They were lovingly tended to a good old age. Their old master joined the Mounted Rifles, in which corps (we heard at second hand, for he never wrote a letter) he fully maintained his character for fine riding and general recklessness, till he broke down altogether, and died some two years later. It is a sad little history, which carries its own moral. CHAPTER VI. _START IN LIFE._ My brother, after taking his degree, remained up at Oxford in lodgings, attending lectures; and, when I went out of College in the term before my own examination, I joined him, and once again we found ourselves living in a common sitting room. I think it was a very great pleasure to both of us; and as soon as my troubles in the Schools were over, and the short leisure time which generally follows that event had set in, we began to talk over subjects which had hitherto been scarcely mentioned between us, but which, on the threshold of active life, were becoming of absorbing interest. In the previous autumn I had made a tour with a pupil in the North of England and Scotland. I had gone, by choice, to commercial hotels in several of the large northern towns, as I had discovered that commercial rooms were the most likely places for political discussion, and was anxious to talk over the great question of that day with the very vigorous and able gentlemen who frequented them. The Anti-Corn-Law agitation was then at its height, and, to cut a long story short, I had come back from the North an ardent Freetrader. In other directions also I was rapidly falling away from the political faith in which we had been brought up. I am not conscious, indeed I do not believe, that Arnold’s influence was ever brought to bear directly on English politics, in the case even of those boys who (like my brother and myself) came specially under it, in his own house, and in the sixth form. What he did for us was, to make us think on the politics of Israel, and Rome, and Greece, leaving us free to apply the lessons he taught us in these, as best we could, to our own country. But now his life had been published, and had come like a revelation to many of us; explaining so much that had appeared inexplicable, and throwing a white light upon great sections, both of the world which we had realized more or less through the classics, and the world which was lying under our eyes, and all around us, and which we now began, for the first time, to recognize as one and the same. The noble side of democracy was carrying me away. I was haunted by Arnold’s famous sentence, “If there is one truth short of the highest for which I would gladly die, it is democracy without Jacobinism;” and “the People’s Charter” was beginning to have strange attractions for me.