Such a resolution as that which, as I have just shown you, was taken by my brother at the end of his residence at Oxford, is always a turning-point in character. If faithfully and thoroughly carried out, it will strengthen the whole man; lifting him on to a new plane, as it were, and enabling him, without abruptly breaking away from his old life, to look at its surroundings from a higher standpoint, and so to get a new and a truer perspective. If repented of, or acted out half-heartedly, it is apt to impair a man’s usefulness sadly, to confuse his judgment, and soften the fibre of his will. He gets to look back upon his former pursuits with an exaggerated fondness, and to let them gradually creep back, till they get a stronger hold on him than ever, so that he never learns to put them in their right place at all. The moral of which to you boys is—think well over your important steps in life, and, having made up your minds, never look behind. George never did. From Oban he writes home: “My forthcoming engagement occupies all my thoughts, and indeed a good deal of my time; for if I intend to succeed, I must be well up in everything. I shall not, therefore, be able to make many excursions from Oban.” Your grandfather had been a friend of Sir Walter Scott, and had brought us up on his works; and had suggested to George that this would be a good opportunity for visiting a number of the spots immortalized by the Wizard of the North. This was his answer. In the same spirit I find him writing about the same time as to a new cricket club, which was starting under very favourable auspices in Berkshire, and in which he had been asked to take a leading part: “I shall certainly not join the A. C. Club; and as for Tom, I should think his joining more improbable still. Cricket is over for both of us, except accidentally.” In this spirit he took to his new work; and, going into it heartily and thoroughly, found it very pleasant. He occupied Byron House at Harrow, with his pupils, in which his old friend Mr. M. Arnold afterwards lived. There were several of his old schoolfellows, and college friends, among the Masters; and I, and others of his old friends, used to run down occasionally, on half-holidays, from London, and play football or cricket with the boys, amongst whom the prestige of his athletic career of course made him a great favourite and hero. Thus he got as much society as he cared for, and found time, in the intervals of his regular work, for a good deal of general reading. In fact, I never knew him more cheerful than during these years of what most of us regarded as lost time, and in which we certainly expected he would have been bored, and disappointed. This would not have been so perhaps had he proved unsuccessful; but his pupils got on well in the school and their father soon found him out, and appreciated him. At the beginning of the first long vacation he writes home:—