ty of the
room, and a clock of stupendous dimensions at the other.

Encompassed by the massy walls of this venerable academy, I passed, yet
not in tedium or disgust, the years of the third lustrum of my life.
The teeming brain of childhood requires no external world of incident to
occupy or amuse it; and the apparently dismal monotony of a school was
replete with more intense excitement than my riper youth has derived
from luxury, or my full manhood from crime. Yet I must believe that my
first mental development had in it much of the uncommon--even much of
the outre. Upon mankind at large the events of very early existence
rarely leave in mature age any definite impression. All is gray
shadow--a weak and irregular remembrance--an indistinct regathering of
feeble pleasures and phantasmagoric pains. With me this is not so. In
childhood I must have felt with the energy of a man what I now find
stamped upon memory in lines as vivid, as deep, and as durable as the
exergues of the Carthaginian medals.

Yet in fact--in the fact of the world's view--how little was there
to remember! The morning's awakening, the nightly summons to bed;
the connings, the recitations; the periodical half-holidays, and
perambulations; the play-ground, with its broils, its pastimes, its
intrigues;--these, by a mental sorcery long forgotten, were made to
involve a wilderness of sensation, a world of rich incident, an
universe of varied emotion, of excitement the most passionate and
spirit-stirring. "Oh, le bon temps, que ce siecle de fer!"

In truth, the ardor, the enthusiasm, and the imperiousness of my
disposition, soon rendered me a marked character among my schoolmates,
and by slow, but natural gradations, gave me an ascendancy over all
not greatly older than myself;--over all with a single exception.
This exception was found in the person of a scholar, who, although
no relation, bore the same Christian and surname as myself;--a
circumstance, in fact, little remarkable; for, notwithstanding a noble
descent, mine was one of those everyday appellations which seem, by
prescriptive right, to have been, time out of mind, the common property
of the mob. In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as
William Wilson,--a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real.
My namesake alone, of those who in school phraseology constituted "our
set," presumed to compete with me in the studies of the class--in the
sports and broils of the play-groun