Thus his apprenticeship began to feed and stimulate his instinctive interest in public affairs. His daily experience led him back at every turn into larger public interests and speculations. He had his week evenings free; and so gradually among the young men of Portmadoc he was led into that life of debate which has always been his very life-blood. In 1880 his uncle, his mother, his brother, and his sister gave up the little cottage at Llanystumdwy and moved to “Morvin House” in Criccieth. Richard Lloyd and Mrs. William George, their mother, had now saved enough to enable Uncle Lloyd to give up the bootmaking; and his interest was now so much centred round David that he decided to make a move that would enable the youth to live at home. The little house where David was to live for the next ten years was just beneath the walls of that shattered Norman castle which crowns a precipitous cliff on the very edge of the sea. Now battered and worn by the assaults of man and the ravages of the ocean, that castle was once a strong link in that scheme of blockhouse fortresses which the Normans built to keep down North Wales. The ruins typify to-day the valour of this land of bards, and prove the power of a little nation over a mighty conqueror. At its strongest, the rule of the Normans extended very few feet beyond those castle walls. Now this fortress is in ruins; and all around the very portals of that ancient blockhouse you will hear few words of any language except the very tongue which the Normans tried to ban and to bar.[16] To this house David Lloyd George now came home every evening and he was able to give up his kindly lodgings in Portmadoc. This return to the strongest influence in his youth perhaps explains a certain deepening of purpose which now becomes visible in his diaries[17]; but there emerges also a new independence of spirit. Somewhat to the alarm of the uncle, the youth was beginning to exhibit a rambling interest that went far outside that still lagoon of puritanism which was the home of that high, simple spirit. There was already a touch of that defiant self-confidence which has so often since puzzled and troubled both the followers and the counsellors of Mr. Lloyd George. The young man was reading widely and daringly—not merely sermons, but plays, histories, and novels. He was going through crises of spiritual doubt unknown to the securely anchored soul of his foster-father. He was catching the malady of his age, and finding its remedy, as so many others of that time found it, in the vague anodyne of books like Carlyle’s _Sartor Resartus_.