ne was drawn against him. With
the aristocratic cadets, it was because of his promotion from the ranks.
Yet the very experience which brought their contempt upon him gave him a
sense of superiority that made their manner toward him the harder to
bear, and drilling with green boys after having been two years a
soldier, he found most irksome.

While the snubbing to which he was subjected was general enough to make
his situation extremely unpleasant, however, it was by no means
unanimous. "Gibs" and "Old P." his convivial room-mates in Number 28,
took him to their hearts at once, and he really liked them when he was
in the mood for companions of their type, but they wore cruelly upon his
nerves when the divine fire within him was burning. So indeed would any
room-mates, for at home always, and most of the time at the University,
one of his chief comforts had been his own room where he could shut out
all the world and be alone with his dreams.

There was, at West Point, nothing like a repetition of his course at the
University. The trouble which his attack of gambling fever had gotten
him into had proved a severe but wholesome lesson, and he had let cards
alone at once and forever. In his ignorance of his own family history,
he did not know that for one of his blood, the only safety lay in total
abstinence from the cup that cheers, but the intense and instantaneous
excitement he found a single glass of wine produced in his brain--an
excitement amounting almost to madness--was in itself a warning to him,
and kept him strictly within the bounds of moderation.

There were times, however, when with a chicken and a bottle of brandy,
purchased secretly from old Benny, and smuggled, at great hazard, into
the room, Edgar Goodfellow could, with zest join his rolicking
room-mates in making merry, and in spite of his strict adherence to the
single glass, generally out-do them at their own games.

But there was no place in that room for Edgar the Dreamer; and between
the spirit-dulling routine and discipline of classes and drills with
youths for the most part younger than himself and inferior in mentality
and cultivation, but who bore themselves as his superiors, and the
impossibility of an hour of solitude, the lovely "Ligeia" became unreal
and remote. He could no longer catch the sounds of her voice, or feel
her presence near. His muse, too, had become shy and difficult and when
she deigned to visit him at all, it was generally in