Brandon is eighteen, and Ashley will be soon.
So, when he was eighteen years old, he ran away from his pleasant home and went to sea.
But the literary partnership ceased in about eighteen years, when only the first portion of the plan had been completed, because each of the members felt he could work to better advantage separately than jointly.
For his son, before he was eighteen years old, he procured a deanery, four archdeaconries, five prebends and a chancellorship, and he sought to thrust him into the bishopric of Durham.
Before he was sixteen he attended lectures at Owens College, and at eighteen he gained a mathematical scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1871 as senior wrangler and first Smith's prizeman, having previously taken the degree of D.Sc. at London University and won a Whitworth scholarship. Although elected a fellow and tutor of his college, he stayed up at Cambridge only for a very short time, preferring to learn practical engineering as a pupil in the works in which his father was a partner.
