 words for
many a year to come. Your papa is not here to beat you now, this is a change in
the conditions of your existence, and should be followed by changed actions.
Obey me, your true self, and things will go tolerably well with you, but only
listen to that outward and visible old husk of yours which is called your
father, and I will rend you in pieces even unto the third and fourth generation
as one who has hated God; for I, Ernest, am the God who made you.«
    How shocked Ernest would have been if he could have heard the advice he was
receiving; what consternation too there would have been at Battersby; but the
matter did not end here, for this same wicked inner self gave him bad advice
about his pocket money, the choice of his companions, and on the whole Ernest
was attentive and obedient to its behests, more so than Theobald had been. The
consequence was he learned little, his mind growing more slowly and his body
rather faster than heretofore: and when by and by his inner self urged him in
directions where he met obstacles beyond his strength to combat, he took -
though with passionate compunctions of conscience - the nearest course to the
one from which he was debarred which circumstances would allow.
    It may be guessed that Ernest was not the chosen friend of the more sedate
and well-conducted youth then studying at Roughborough. Some of the less
desirable boys used to go to public houses and drink more beer than was good for
them; Ernest's inner self can hardly have told him to ally himself to these
young gentlemen, but he did so at an early age, and was sometimes made pitiably
sick by an amount of beer which would have produced no effect upon a stronger
boy; Ernest's inner self must have interposed at this point and told him that
there was not much fun in this, for he dropped the habit ere it had taken firm
hold over him, and never resumed it; but he contracted another at the
disgracefully early age of between thirteen and fourteen which he did not
relinquish, though to the present day his conscious self keeps dinging it into
him that the less he smokes the better.
    And so matters went on till my hero was nearly fourteen years old! If by
that time he was not actually a young blackguard, he belonged to a debateable
class between the sub-reputable and the upper disreputable, with perhaps rather
more leaning to the latter except so far as vices of meanness were concerned,
from which indeed he was fairly free. I gather this partly
