In the still summer evenings, when he took his guitar, and sat upon the steps of the portico, the boys would crowd around him, and listen in breathless silence to his sweet music.  As long as his own inclinations were not crossed or interfered with, a more agreeable companion could not be found.  He had the frank, open manners, which are not seldom joined with a quick temper, and in many things he showed a noble, generous disposition; but as soon as the wishes of others in their sports and recreations came in conflict with his own, his terrible passion was roused at once, and carried all before it.  Many were the complaints which he carried to his mother of insult and ill-treatment; and before he had been six months at Dr. Hamilton’s school, he was urging her to allow him to remove to another of which he had heard, and where he fancied he should be more happy.  Mrs. Elwyn’s health was not as firm as it once was; she was becoming weak and nervous, and dreaded change, and endeavored to pacify her son, and to persuade him to remain at Dr. Hamilton’s school.  No doubt he would have effected his object by teazing, but it was accomplished in another way.

There are boys to be found in every large school who delight in playing practical jokes, and in teazing and tormenting those who are susceptible of annoyance in this way.  There was a large, stout boy in Dr. Hamilton’s school, of the name of Colton, a great bully and teaze, whose delight it seemed to be to torment and put into a passion one so fiery as our little hero, feeling safe from the only kind of retaliation which could injure him, as he was so much the stoutest and strongest of the two.  This boy soon found that there was one point upon which Lewie was peculiarly sensitive, and the slightest allusion to which would call the red blood to his face.  This was the fact of his being accompanied by his mother when he came to the school, and her having taken board in the village, that she might be near him as long as he was there.  Lewie had remonstrated with his mother, when she proposed accompanying him, and had urged her to accept his Uncle Wharton’s invitation to make his house her home.  He was just at that age when boys love to appear independent and manly, and able to take care of themselves; and he had hoped that he should be allowed to go alone to school, as many of the other boys did, or perhaps to accompany his uncle and cousins.  But to be taken there under the care of a woman, and to have her remain near him, as if he could not take care of himself!  Lewie thought this a most humiliating state of things.  But for once his mother was firm.  It would be like severing her heart-strings, to separate her from her darling son; and wherever he went, she must go as long as she lived.  This ingratitude on the part of Lewie and evident desire to rid himself of her company, after so many years spent in devotion to his slightest wishes, wore upon her spirits, and was one cause, perhaps the principal one, of her nervous depression, and consequent ill health.