There is no reason why, even at a school for backward and troublesome boys, a fellow shouldn’t improve, if he gave his mind to it. But that is just where I failed. I didn’t give my mind to it. In fact, I made up my mind it was no use trying to improve, and therefore didn’t try. The consequence was, that after Jack Smith left, I cast in my lot with the rest of the backward and troublesome boys, and lost all ambition to be much better than the rest of them.
Flanagan, the fellow I liked best, was always good-humoured and lively, but I’m not sure that he would have been called a boy of good principles. At any rate, he never professed to be particularly ambitious in any such way, and in that respect was very different from Hawkesbury, who, by the time he left Stonebridge House, six months before me, to go to a big public school, had quite impressed me with the worth of his character.
But this is a digression. As I was saying, I left Stonebridge House a good deal wilder, and more rackety, and more sophisticated, than I had entered it two years before. However, I left it also with considerably more knowledge of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division; and that in my uncle’s eye appeared to be of far more moment than my moral condition.
“Fred,” he said to me the day after I had got home, and after I had returned from a triumphant march through Brownstroke, to show myself off to my old comrades generally, and Cad Prog in particular—“Fred,” said my uncle, “I am going to send you to London.”
“To London!” cried I, not knowing exactly whether to be delighted, or astonished, or alarmed, or all three—“to London.”
“Yes. You must get a situation, and do something to earn your living.”
I ruminated over this announcement, and my uncle continued, “You are old enough to provide for yourself, and I expect you to do so.”
There was a pause, at the end of which, for lack of any better remark, I said, “Yes.”
“The sooner you start the better,” continued my uncle. “I have marked a few advertisements in that pile of newspapers,” added he, pointing to a dozen or so of papers on his table. “You had better take them and look through them, and tell me if you see anything that would suit you.”
Whereat my uncle resumed his writing, and I, with the papers in my arms, walked off in rather a muddled state of mind to my bedroom.