Crossword-Solution: TRUANTRY 8 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 11

The chief and far the most lamentable change is the absence of a certain lean, ugly, idle, unpopular student, whose presence was for me the gist and heart of the whole matter; whose changing humours, fine occasional purposes of good, flinching acceptance of evil, shiverings on wet, east-windy, morning journeys up to class, infinite yawnings during lecture and unquenchable gusto in the delights of truantry, made up the sunshine and shadow of my college life.

Indeed, I denied myself many opportunities; acting upon an extensive and highly rational system of truantry, which cost me a great deal of trouble to put in exercise—perhaps as much as would have taught me Greek—and sent me forth into the world and the profession of letters with the merest shadow of an education.

Then the truth came out, and, had I been only for a mild walk on the links, retribution would have overtaken my truantry.

The same quality, with the signs which he always showed of quick natural intelligence when he chose to learn, must have helped to spare him many punishments from teachers which he earned by persistent and ingenious truantry.

Reared in a slave-holding community of narrow-visioned, arrogantly provincial people of the lower middle class; seeing his own father so degrade himself as to cuff his negro house-boy; consorting with ragamuffins, the rag-tag and bob-tail of the town, in his passion for bohemianism and truantry--young Clemens never learned to know the beauty and the dignity, the purity and the humanity, of that aristocratic patriarchal South which produced such beautiful figures as Lee and Lanier.