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Well, for a week I was a model of punctuality and industry; but then the confectioner changed his sugar negro for an elephant made all of toffee, and I was once more beguiled. Once more from top of my class I sank to the bottom; and though after that I took fits and starts of regularity and study, I never was able for long together to recover my place, and Mrs Sparrow fairly gave me up as a bad job.

What was to be done? I was growing up. In time my twelfth birthday arrived, and it was time I went to boarding school.

I could see with what anxiety my parents looked forward to the time, and I inwardly reproached myself for being the cause of their trouble. “Perhaps,” thought I, “I shall get all right at Welford,” and having consoled myself with that possibility I thought no more about it. My father talked very earnestly to me before I left home for the first time in my life. He had no fears, he said, for my honesty or my good principles; but he had fears for my perseverance and diligence. “Either you must conquer your habit of dawdling,” he said, “or it will conquer you.” I was ready to promise any sacrifice to be cured of this enemy; but he said, “No, lad, don’t promise, but remember and do!” And then he corded up my trunk and carried it downstairs. I cannot to this day recall my farewell with my mother without tears. It is enough to say that I quitted the parental home determined as I never was before to do my duty and fight against my besetting sin, and occupied that doleful day’s journey with picturing to myself the happiness which my altered habits would bring to the dear parents whom I was leaving behind.

I pass over my first week at Welford. It was a new and wonderful world to me; very desolate at first, but by degrees more attractive, till at last I went the way of all schoolboys, and found myself settled down to my new life as if I had never known another.

All this time I had faithfully kept my resolution. I was as punctual as clockwork, and as diligent as an ant. Nothing would tempt me to abate my attention in the preparation of my lessons; no seductions of cricket or fishing would keep me late for “call over.” I had already gained the approval of my masters, I had made my mark in my class, and I had written glowing letters home, telling of my kept resolutions, and wondering why they should ever before have seemed difficult to adhere to.

But as I got better acquainted with some of my new schoolfellows it became less easy to stick steadily to work. I happened to find myself in hall one evening, where we were preparing our tasks for next day, seated next to a lively young scapegrace, whose tongue rattled incessantly, and who, not content to be idle himself, must needs make every one idle too.

“What a muff you are, Charlie,” he said to me once, as I was poring over my Caesar and struggling desperately to make out the meaning of a phrase–“what a muff you are, to be grinding away like that! Why don’t you use a crib?”

“What’s a crib?” I inquired.

“What, don’t you know what a crib is? It’s a translation. I’ve got one. I’ll lend it to you, and you will be able to do your Caesar with it like winking.”

I didn’t like the notion at first, and went on hunting up the words in the dictionary till my head ached. But next evening he pulled the “crib” out of his pocket and showed it to me. I could not resist the temptation of looking at it, and no sooner had I done so than I found it gave at a glance the translation it used to take me an hour to get at with the dictionary. So I began to use the “crib” regularly; and thus, getting my lessons quickly done, I gradually began to relapse into my habits of dawdling.