r was the most undesirable whom he could have chosen. It
was a new boy named Brigson. This boy had been expelled from one of the
most ill-managed schools in Ireland, although, of course, the fact had
been treacherously concealed from the authorities at Roslyn; and now he
was let loose, without warning or caution, among the Roslyn boys.
Better for them if their gates had been open to the pestilence! the
pestilence could but have killed the body, but this boy--this fore-front
fighter in the devil's battle--did much to ruin many an immortal soul.
He systematically, from the very first, called evil good, and good evil,
put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter. He openly threw aside the
admission of any one moral obligation. Never did some of the Roslyn
boys, to their dying day, forget the deep, intolerable, unfathomable
flood of moral turpitude and iniquity which he bore with him; a flood,
which seemed so irresistible, that the influence of such boys as Montagu
and Owen to stay its onrush seemed as futile as the weight of a feather
to bar the fury of a mountain stream. Eric might have done much, Duncan
might have done much, to aid the better cause had they tried; but they
resisted at first but faintly, and then not at all, until they too were
swept away in the broadening tide of degeneracy and sin.

Big, burly, and strong, though much younger than he looked (if he stated
his age correctly, which I doubt), Brigson, being low in the school,
naturally became the bully and the leader of all the lower forms--the
bully if they opposed him, the leader if they accepted his guidance. A
little army of small boys attended him, and were ever ready for the
schemes of mischief to which he deliberately trained them, until they
grew almost as turbulent, as disobedient, and as wicked as himself. He
taught both by precept and example, that towards masters neither honour
was to be recognised, nor respect to be considered due. To cheat them,
to lie to them, to annoy them in every possible way--to misrepresent
their motives, mimic their defects, and calumniate their actions--was
the conduct which he inaugurated towards them; and for the time that he
continued at Roslyn the whole lower-school was a Pandemonium of evil
passions and despicable habits.

Every one of the little boys became more or less amenable to his
influence, and among them Vernon Williams. Had Eric done his duty, this
would never have been; but he was half ashamed to