admitted it was not a severe blow; nevertheless Charlie Gordon was for
this slight offence put back six months for his commission, which
turned out well in the end, since it secured for him a second
lieutenancy in the Royal Engineers in place of the Royal Artillery."
This alteration in the branch of the service to which he was attached
was due to his own act. He decided that, as his contemporaries would
be put ahead of him, he would work for the Engineers instead of the
Artillery.

Even to the end of his life there were two sides to his character.
Private grief, much disappointment, and a long solitary existence,
contributed to make him a melancholy philosopher, and a sometimes
austere critic of a selfish world, but beneath this crust were a
genial and generous disposition that did not disdain the lighter side
of human nature, a heart too full of kindness to cherish wrath for
long, and an almost boyish love of fun that could scarcely be
repressed. If this was the individual in his quieter and contemplative
moods, an energy that never tired, and a warlike spirit that only
needed the occasion to blaze forth, revealed the man of action. It may
be pronounced a paradox to say so, but to the end of his life the true
Gordon was more of the soldier than the saint.

Even in the midst of his escapades at the Academy, something of the
spirit of the future hero revealed itself. However grave the offence
or heavy the punishment, he was never backward in taking his share--or
more than his share--of the blame for any scrape into which he and his
friends were brought by their excessive high spirits. On more than one
occasion his ardour and sense of justice resulted in his being made
the scapegoat of worse offenders, and it seems probable that he
generally bore more than his proper share of the blame and punishment
for acts of insubordination. But there were limits to his capacity of
suffering and sense of guilt, and when one of his superiors declared
that he "would never make an officer," he touched a point of honour,
and Gordon's vigorous and expressive reply was to tear the epaulettes
from his shoulder and throw them at his superior's feet. In this
incident the reader will not fail to see a touch and forecast of
greatness. He was ever willing to pay the penalty of youthful
indiscretion, but he was sensitive to the reproach of honour, and his
exuberant spirits detracted in no respect from his sense of the
nobility of his professio