It was stupefying.  Well, although through his course I stood by him, with something of the sentiment which a mother feels for a crippled child; and he always saved himself—­just by miracle, apparently.

Now of course the thing that would expose him and kill him at last was mathematics.  I resolved to make his death as easy as I could; so I drilled him and crammed him, and crammed him and drilled him, just on the line of questions which the examiner would be most likely to use, and then launched him on his fate.  Well, sir, try to conceive of the result:  to my consternation, he took the first prize!  And with it he got a perfect ovation in the way of compliments.

Sleep!  There was no more sleep for me for a week.  My conscience tortured me day and night.  What I had done I had done purely through charity, and only to ease the poor youth’s fall—­I never had dreamed of any such preposterous result as the thing that had happened.  I felt as guilty and miserable as the creator of Frankenstein.  Here was a wooden-head whom I had put in the way of glittering promotions and prodigious responsibilities, and but one thing could happen:  he and his responsibilities would all go to ruin together at the first opportunity.

The Crimean war had just broken out.  Of course there had to be a war, I said to myself:  we couldn’t have peace and give this donkey a chance to die before he is found out.  I waited for the earthquake.  It came.  And it made me reel when it did come.  He was actually gazetted to a captaincy in a marching regiment!  Better men grow old and gray in the service before they climb to a sublimity like that.  And who could ever have foreseen that they would go and put such a load of responsibility on such green and inadequate shoulders?  I could just barely have stood it if they had made him a cornet; but a captain—­think of it!  I thought my hair would turn white.

Consider what I did—­I who so loved repose and inaction.  I said to myself, I am responsible to the country for this, and I must go along with him and protect the country against him as far as I can.  So I took my poor little capital that I had saved up through years of work and grinding economy, and went with a sigh and bought a cornetcy in his regiment, and away we went to the field.

And there—­oh dear, it was awful.  Blunders? why, he never did anything but blunder.  But, you see, nobody was in the fellow’s secret—­everybody had him focused wrong, and necessarily misinterpreted his performance every time—­consequently they took his idiotic blunders for inspirations of genius; they did honestly!  His mildest blunders were enough to make a man in his right mind cry; and they did make me cry—­and rage and rave too, privately.  And the thing that kept me always in a sweat of apprehension was the fact that every fresh blunder he made increased the lustre of his reputation!  I kept saying to myself, he’ll get so high that when discovery does finally come it will be like the sun falling out of the sky.