"On your own account, man? Why, you would be ruined!" cried old Rodda, over his port.
"I doubt it, sir," responded Roscoria, gayly. "You forget that moldy old house of mine. I shall never be able to let it, unless to an incurable lunatic, and it is too large for any decent bachelor to live alone in. Good! I fill it with a set of boys. I teach them on an entirely new and original system—and make a little money, which I need not tell you, sir, is wanted in this quarter."
"I would lay you any money, if you had it, young man, that you fail," said Mr. Rodda, comfortably (he was a little "cheered" by this time;) "but if you are bent on the experiment, and as I have a high opinion of your principles, though none of your judgment, there is my youngest son, Tom; we can make nothing of him at home, and I don't believe he will ever be any good, so you may just take him as a beginning."
"No, really, sir? You are too good," said Roscoria, flushing grandly with the inflatus of ambition. "I believe much can be done with boys by taking them young, and if I succeed with dear Tom—nothing ought ever to baffle me again."
Roscoria settled down in his ancestral home at the head of a collection of such boys as a private tutor will generally get—awkward boys in temper, vicious boys, hopelessly dense boys, backward boys, idle, wool-gathering, foolish, blockish boys. Two lads had been expelled from Eton, but Roscoria thought himself a born reformer. A third youth had been recently superannuated: he was for ballast, Louis said. At first the young schoolmaster governed the wild set gently, having great faith in boyhood. Afterward he fell one afternoon upon a passage in Plato: "If he is willingly persuaded, well; but if not, like a bent and twisted tree, they make him straight by threats and blows."
Blows! Happy thought! "The influence of my mind and character on theirs has failed," Roscoria thought. "Go to, now; let us see whether there be not some animal magnetism by which a lad may be drawn toward the good." And Roscoria felt up and down his strong young arm, and knew a complacent sense of muscle.
At this time Roscoria met again, and liked as well as ever, Dick Tregurtha.
Tregurtha had grown sun-browned, tall, and broad. Tregurtha had merry blue eyes and a winsome grin. One was happy to shake hands with a man who was obviously on such good terms with his own heart and conscience.
"You helped me to run away from school, you know," he said, holding out his hand to Roscoria when they first met again.
"Yes; did I serve you well by that?" asked Roscoria, who had grown into what our ancestors called "a pretty fellow," with features as correct as his own morality, and a pair of dreamy black eyes.