And Vernon Williams was no longer a new boy.  The worst had happened to him, which Eric in his better moments could have feared.  He had fallen into thoroughly bad hands, and Eric, who should have been his natural guardian and guide, began to treat him with indifference, and scarcely ever had any affectionate intercourse with him.  It is by no means unfrequent that brothers at school see but little of each other, and follow their several pursuits, and choose their various companions, with small regard to the relationship between them.

Yet Eric could not overlook or be blind to the fact, that Vernon’s chief friend or leader was the most undesirable whom he could have chosen.  It was a new boy named Brigson.  This boy had been expelled from one of the most ill-managed schools in Ireland, although, of course, the fact had been most treacherously concealed from the authorities at Roslyn; and now he was let loose, without warning or caution, among the Roslyn boys.  Better for them if their gates had been open to the pestilence! the pestilence could but have killed the body, but this boy—­this fore-front fighter in the devil’s battle—­did ruin many an immortal soul.  He systematically, from the very first, called evil good and good evil, put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.  He openly threw aside the admission of any one moral obligation.  Never did some of the Roslyn boys, to their dying day, forget the deep, intolerable, unfathomable flood of moral turpitude and iniquity which he bore with him; a flood, which seemed so irresistible, and the influence of such boys as Montagu and Owen to stay its onrush seemed as futile as the weight of a feather to bar the fury of a mountain stream.  Eric might have done much, Duncan might have done much, to aid the better cause, had they tried; but they resisted at first but faintly, and then not at all, until they too were swept away in the broadening tide of degeneracy and sin.

Big, burly, and strong, though much younger than he looked (if he stated his age correctly, which I doubt), Brigson, being low in the school, naturally became the bully and the Coryphaeus of all the lower forms—­the bully if they opposed him, the Coryphaeus if they accepted his guidance.  A little army of small boys attended him, and were ever ready for the schemes of mischief to which he deliberately trained them, until they grew almost as turbulent, as disobedient, and as wicked, as himself.  He taught, both, by precept and example, that towards masters neither honor was to be recognized, nor respect to be considered due.  To cheat them, to lie to them, to annoy them in every possible way—­to misrepresent their motives, mimic their defects, and calumniate their actions—­was the conduct which he inaugurated towards them; and for the time that he continued at Roslyn the whole lower school was a Pandemonium of evil passions and despicable habits.