of man led
him to forgetfulness of God; and even a glance at his countenance showed
a self-sufficiency and arrogance which ill became the refinement of his
features, and ill replaced the ingenuous modesty of former years.

And Vernon Williams was no longer a new boy. The worst had happened to
him, which Eric in his better moments could have feared. He had fallen
into thoroughly bad hands, and Eric, who should have been his natural
guardian and guide, began to treat him with indifference, and scarcely
ever had any affectionate intercourse with him. It is by no means
unfrequent that brothers at school see but little of each other, and
follow their several pursuits, and choose their various companions, with
small regard to the relationship between them.

Yet Eric could not overlook or be blind to the fact, that Vernon's chief
friend or leader 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 most 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 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, and 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 Coryphaeus of all the lower
forms--the bully if they opposed him, the Coryphaeus if they accepted
his guidance. A little