We will not follow our young adventurer to the academic halls, or trace his path through foreign lands.  It is enough for our purpose that he acquired little knowledge at college, save the knowledge of evil; and that he met with many misadventures, and suffered much inconvenience and mortification, during his journey through the Continent.  He soon discovered that the world was not a paradise; that his uncle was not a wise man; and that human nature, with some trifling variations, which were generally more the result of circumstances and education than of any peculiar virtue in the individual, was much the same at home and abroad; that men, in order to conform to the usages of society, were often obliged to appear what they were not, and sacrifice their best feelings to secure the approbation of persons whom in secret they despised; that he who would fight the battle of life and come off victorious, must do it with other weapons than those with which fashion and pleasure supply their champions.

Years of reckless folly fled away, before these wholesome lessons of experience were forced upon Algernon’s unguarded heart.  Fearful of falling into his brother’s error, he ran into the contrary extreme, and never suspected himself a dupe, until he found himself the victim of some designing adventurer, who had served a longer apprenticeship to the world, and had gained a more perfect knowledge of the fallibility of its children.

His father groaned over his extravagant bills:  yet not one-third of the money remitted to Algernon was expended by him.  His uncle was the principal aggressor; for he felt no remorse while introducing his nephew to scenes which, in his early days, had effected his own ruin.  Their immoral tendency, and the sorrow and trouble they were likely to entail upon the young man, by arousing the anger of his father, never gave him the least uneasiness.  He had squandered such large sums of money at the gambling-houses in Paris, that he dared not show his face at the Hall until the storm was blown over; and to such a thoughtless, extravagant being as Alfred Hurdlestone, “sufficient to the day was the evil thereof.”

Without any strikingly vicious propensities, it was impossible for Algernon Hurdlestone to escape from the contaminating influence of his uncle, to whom he was strongly attached, without pollution.  He imbibed from him a relish for trifling amusements and extravagant expenditure, which clung to him through life.  The sudden death of his misjudging instructor recalled him to a painful sense of past indiscretions.  He determined to amend his ways, and make choice of some profession, and employ his time in a more honorable manner for the future.  These serious impressions scarcely survived the funeral of the thoughtless man whose death he sincerely lamented; but the many debts his uncle had contracted, and the exhausted state of his purse, urged upon him the imperative necessity of returning to England; and the voyage was undertaken accordingly.