My father's precept of _perseverance_ carried me through my schoolboy days gloriously, even as it had borne him through the expense of paying out of his scanty earnings for the education of nine children. I wanted three days of completing my thirteenth year when I left the school, but then I had begun to read Homer in Greek--I had read Horace in Latin, and I was acquainted with Euclid. My father was proud of me, my master was proud of me, for I had _persevered_. It was seldom that the son of a cottar, or the son of any one else, left the school at such an age so far advanced. Many said that before I was twenty they would see me in a pulpit--but they were mistaken. My father's habitual word, _persevere_, had taken too deep root in my heart, until it produced a sort of mental perpetual motion, which ever urged me onward--onward! and I found that the limits of a pulpit would never confine or contain me. I felt like a thing of life and happiness, that rejoiced and shook its wings beneath the sunshine of freedom, and I longed to expand my wings, even though they should fall or break under me. I have said that I left school three days before I had completed my thirteenth year, and on the day that I did so, I was to become tutor in the family of a Colonel Mortimer, of the Honourable the East India Company's service. I was to be at once the playmate and instructor of two children; the one five, the other seven years of age--both boys. But his family contained another child--Jessy Mortimer--a lovely, dark-eyed girl of fifteen. The sun of an eastern clime had early drawn forth her beauty into ripeness, and although but two years older than myself, she was as a woman, while I was not only a mere boy, but, if I might use the expression, something between what might be termed a boy and a child; and certainly at the very age when children are most disagreeable to persons of a riper age. Yet, young as I was, from the very day that I beheld her, my soul took up its habitation in her eyes. I was dumb in her presence, I opened not my mouth. I was as a whisper, a shadow, in the family--a piece of mechanism that performed the task designed for it. It was a presumptuous thing in the son of a humble barnman to fix his eyes and his heart upon the daughter of an East India colonel, and one two years older than himself; but the heart hath its vagaries, even as our actions have.