CHAPTER XVI.
I Go Down Hill It came in the following winter.
My father had now begun to teach me as well as Tom, but I confess I did not then value the privilege.

I had got much too fond of the society of Peter Mason, and all the time I could command I spent with him.

Always full of questionable frolic, the spirit of mischief gathered in him as the dark nights drew on.

The sun, and the wind, and the green fields, and the flowing waters of summer kept him within bounds; but when the ice and the snow came, when the sky was grey with one cloud, when the wind was full of needle-points of frost and the ground was hard as a stone, when the evenings were dark, and the sun at noon shone low down and far away in the south, then the demon of mischief awoke in the bosom of Peter Mason, and, this winter, I am ashamed to say, drew me also into the net.
Nothing very bad was the result before the incident I am about to relate.

There must have been, however, a gradual declension towards it, although the pain which followed upon this has almost obliterated the recollection of preceding follies.