Little by little I relaxed; little by little I dawdled, till presently, almost without knowing it, I again began to slip down the hill.

And this was in other matters besides my studies.
Instead of keeping up my practice at cricket and field sports, I took to hulking about the playground with my hands in my pockets.

If I started on an expedition to find moths or hunt squirrels, I never got half a mile beyond the school boundaries, and never, of course, caught the ghost of anything.

If I entered for a race in our school sports, I let the time go without training, and so was beaten easily by fellows whom I had always thought my inferiors.

The books I read for my amusement out of school hours were all abandoned after a chapter or two; my very letters home became irregular and stupid, and often were altogether shelved.
And all this time (such is the blindness of some people) I was imagining I had quite retrieved my lost reputation! I shall never forget, however, how at last I discovered that my time at Welford had been wasted, and that, so far from having got the better of my enemy, I had become a more confirmed dawdler than ever.
I had come to my last half-year at school, being now seventeen.