The sweet arrogance of youth uplifted him.  Earth, air and water conspired to encourage him.  To satisfy this unspoken craving for action he would, from his outlook on the Jerbourg crags—­where bold Sir Hugh had sat for just such purpose years before—­watch the Weymouth luggers making bad weather of it beyond the Casquets; or challenge in his own boat the rip-tides between Sark and Brechou, and the combers that romped between St. Sampson and the Isle of Herm.

There was no limit to this boy’s hardihood and daring.  The more furious the gale the more congenial the task.  Returning from these frequent baptisms of salt water, his Saxon fairness and Norman freshness aglow with spray, he would loiter on the beach to talk to the kelp gatherers raking amid the breakers, and to watch the mackerel boats, reefed down, flying to the harbour for shelter.  The crayfish in the pools would tempt him, he would try his hand at sand-eeling, or watch the surf men feed a devil-fish to the crabs.  Then up the gray benches of the furrowed cliffs, starred with silver lichens and stone-crop, to where ploughmen were leaving glistening furrows in the big parsnip fields.  Then on through the tangle of sweet-briar, honeysuckle and wild roses, where birds nested in the perfumed foliage, until, the summit reached, surrounded by purple heather and golden gorse, he would look on the sea below, with Sark, like a “basking whale, burning in the sunset.”  Then he would hurry to tell his mother of the day’s exploits, retiring to dream of strange lands and turbulent scenes, in which the roll of drums and roar of cannon seemed never absent.

With his youthful mind possessed with the exploits of the King’s soldiers in Europe and America, and influenced by his brother John’s example—­then captain in the 8th Regiment of the line—­Isaac pleaded successfully to enter the army.  To better prepare for this all-important step, and to become proficient in French, a necessary accomplishment, it was arranged, though he was only fifteen, to place him with a Protestant clergyman in Rotterdam for one year, to complete his education.

His vacations now were few; his visits to the Island flying ones.  But the old life still fascinated him.  His physique developed as the weeks flew by, and he became more and more a striking personality.  This was doubly true, for while he remained the champion swimmer, he was also the best boxer of his class, besides excelling in every other manly sport.  In tugs-of-war and “uprooting the gorse” he had no equals, but a sense of his educational deficiencies kept him at his books.

He had only passed his sixteenth birthday when, one wild March morning in 1785, he was handed an important-looking document.  It was a parchment with the King’s seal attached, his commission of ensign in the 8th Regiment.  Isaac at once joined the regimental depot in England.  It was evident that his lack of learning would prove a barrier to promotion.  He found that much of the leisure hitherto devoted to athletic sports must be given to study.  Behind “sported oak,” while dust accumulated on boxing-glove and foil—­neither the banter of his brother officers nor his love for athletics inducing him to break the resolution—­he bent to his work with a fixity of purpose that augured well for his future.