The boy had one very marked trait, which might promise well for the
future, or otherwise, according to circumstances, and that was a certain
wilful persistence, which often degenerated into downright obstinacy.
Frequently, when his mother thought that she had coaxed or wheedled him
into giving up something of which she did not approve, he would quietly
approach his object in some other way, and gain his point, or sulk till
he did. When he set his heart upon anything he was not as "unstable as
water." While but an indifferent and superficial student, who had
habitually escaped lessons and skipped difficulties, he occasionally
became nettled by a perplexing problem or task, and would work at it
with a sort of vindictive, unrelenting earnestness, as if he were
subduing an enemy. Having put his foot on the obstacle, and mastered the
difficulty that piqued him, he would cast the book aside, indifferent to
the study or science of which it formed but a small fraction.

After all, perhaps the best that could be said of him was that he
possessed fair abilities, and was still subject to the good and generous
impulses of youth. His traits and tendencies were, in the main, all
wrong; but he had not as yet become confirmed and hardened in them.
Contact with the world, which sooner or later tells a man the truth
about himself, however unwelcome, might dissipate the illusion, gained
from his mother's idolatry, that in some indefinite way he was
remarkable in himself, and that he was destined to great things from a
vague and innate superiority, which it had never occurred to him to
analyze.

But as the young man approached his majority his growing habits of
dissipation became so pronounced that even his willingly blind mother
was compelled to recognize them. Rumor of his fast and foolish behavior