The scholastic year came to an end. I took a fairly good place at
the exams, which for me (for certain reasons) happened to be a more
difficult task than for other boys. In that respect I could enter with
a good conscience upon that holiday which was like a long visit _pour
prendre conge_ of the mainland of old Europe I was to see so little of
for the next four-and-twenty years. Such, however, was not the avowed
purpose of that tour. It was rather, I suspect, planned in order to
distract and occupy my thoughts in other directions. Nothing had been
said for months of my going to sea. But my attachment to my young tutor
and his influence over me were so well known that he must have received
a confidential mission to talk me out of my romantic folly. It was an
excellently appropriate arrangement, as neither he nor I had ever had a
single glimpse of the sea in our lives. That was to come by and by for
both of us in Venice, from the outer shore of Lido. Meantime he had
taken his mission to heart so well that I began to feel crushed before
we reached Zurich. He argued in railway trains, in lake steamboats, he
had argued away for me the obligatory sunrise on the Righi, by Jove! Of
his devotion to his unworthy pupil there can be no doubt. He had proved
it already by two years of unremitting and arduous care. I could not
hate him. But he had been crushing me slowly, and when he started to
argue on the top of the Furca Pass he was perhaps nearer a success
than either he or I imagined. I listened to him in despairing silence,
feeling that ghostly, unrealized, and desired sea of my dreams escape
from the unnerved grip of my will.

The enthusiastic old Englishman had passed--and the argument went on.
What reward could I expect from such a life at the end of my years,
either in ambition, honour, or conscience? An unanswerable question. But
I felt no longer crushed. Then our eyes met and a genuine emotion was
visible in his as well as in mine. The end came all at once. He picked