Hitherto the ideal which he had set before him, as the standard to be attained during his school-life, had been one in which a successful devotion to duty, and a real effort to attain to "godliness and good learning," had borne the largest share. But on this morning a very different ideal rose before him; he would abandon all interest in school work, and only aim at being a gay, high-spirited boy, living solely for pleasure, amusement, and self-indulgence. There were many such around him--heroes among their schoolfellows, popular, applauded, and proud. Sin seemed to sit lightly and gracefully upon them. Endowed as he was with every gift of person and appearance, to this condition at least he felt that he could easily attain. It was an ideal not, alas! unnatural to the perilous age: "Which claims for manhood's vice the privilege Of boyhood--when young Dionysius seems All joyous as he burst upon the East A jocund and a welcome conqueror; And Aphrodite, sweet as from the sea She rose, and floated in her pearly shell A laughing girl; when lawless will erects Honour's gay temple on the Mount of God, And meek obedience bears the coward's brand; While Satan in celestial panoply With Sin, his lady, smiling by his side, Defies all heaven to arms." Yes; he would follow the multitude to do all the evil which he saw being done around him; it looked a joyous and delightful prospect. He gazed on the bright vision of sin, on the iridescent waters of pleasure; and did not know that the brightness was a mirage of the burning desert, the iridescence a film of corruption over a stagnant pool. The letter from home was his chief stumbling-block. He loved his father and mother with almost passionate devotion; he clung to his home with an intensity of concentrated love. He really had tried to please them, and to do his best; but yet they didn't seem to give him credit for it. Look at this cold reproachful letter; it maddened him to think of it. There was only one thing which checked him. It was a little voice, which had been more silent lately, because other and passionate tones were heard more loudly; but yet even from a child poor Walter had been accustomed to listen with reverence to its admonitions. It was a voice behind him saying--"This is the way, walk ye in it," now that he was turning aside to the right-hand or to the left. But the noble accents in which it whispered of patience were drowned just now in the clamorous turbulence of those other voices of appeal. The two hours of detention were over, and the struggle was over too. Walter drew his pen with a fierce and angry scrawl over the lines he had written, showed them up to the master in attendance with a careless and almost impudent air, and was hardly out of the room before he gave a shout of emancipation and defiance. Impatience and passion had won the day.