The boy followed implicitly the dictates of nature within him.

He was amiable, straightforward, sanguine, and intensely _earnest_.

When he laughed, he let it out, as sailors have it, "with a will." When there was good cause to be grave, no power on earth could make him smile.

We have called him boy, but in truth he was about that uncertain period of life when a youth is said to be neither a man nor a boy.

His face was good-looking (_every_ earnest, candid face is) and masculine; his hair was reddish-brown and his eye bright-blue.