“Shades of the prison-house begin to close Around the growing boy.” Then, in proportion as his wants increase, his dangers multiply. His animal nature grows and expands, while imagination pales and fades, leaving him very dependent on the common world that surrounds him, often very curious about it, asking a great deal from it, and influenced by it in ten thousand ways. Through this stage he must needs pass, if he is to prove hereafter a complete and well-developed man. Walter Grey, however, was expected to grow at once, and without any interval, from the thoughtful child into the thoughtful man. Boyhood, with “its unchecked, unbidden joy, its dread of books and love of fun,” was not for him. Instead of sharing the sports of merry schoolmates, this boy shared his mother’s cares and anxieties as her friend and confidant, sometimes even already her counsellor. Instead of planning victories at prisoner’s base and trap ball, and raids upon orchards and nut-woods, he planned how to find bread and beer enough for their household, and still to have somewhat over to give to him that needed. Virgil and Plato were to him what “The Seven Champions of Christendom” were to other boys. It is true that he was taught to ride, and to shoot with the bow and arrow, and he could do these as well as any lad of his years; but he did them, as he did everything else, gravely and with a purpose. They were part of his education. It is not easy to defraud Nature of her due. Often, for the time, she seems to acquiesce,—at least she takes it patiently, and makes no sign. But she silently keeps account of every debt; and it is well if some day she does not suddenly present a bill for the sum total, and demand an acquittance, admitting of no denial. Late that night Walter sat in thoughtful mood upon his tresseled bed. His chest, packed by his mother’s careful hand in readiness for the morrow’s journey, lay so near, that his feet, as he swung them back and forwards, sometimes touched it. His doublet was off; his fair hair, tumbled by his restless hands, fell in disorder over his neat Holland shirt. There was no light in the room, save what the moonbeams shed through the narrow, unglazed slit that served for a window. The boy was asking himself a question, often well-nigh the most important a boy can ask, “Shall I tell my mother?” He asked it the more sincerely and earnestly because he had just been repeating the evening prayer his mother taught him, and not without some simple additions, the promptings of his own heart. And now he had a great mind to delay no longer, but to step softly to the door of his mother’s room (where he well knew the light would still be burning), to seek admittance, to kneel down beside her chair—just as he knelt when he learned his first prayer—and to tell her all.