really indicated that the creative faculty in budding genius
was awake and at work.

For a child Edgar's age to be making trials at writing poetry Mr. Allan
regarded as sheer idleness, to be promptly suppressed. Indeed, when he
discovered that the boy had been guilty of such foolishness, he
emphatically ordered him not to repeat it. To counteract the effects of
his wife's spoiling of her adopted son, he felt it his duty to place all
manner of restrictions upon his liberty, which the freedom-loving boy,
with the connivance of his mother and the negro servants who adored him,
disregarded whenever it was possible. Though bathing in the river was
(except upon rare occasions) prohibited, Edgar became before summer was
over, the most expert swimmer and diver of his years in town, and many
an afternoon when Mr. Allan supposed that he was in his room, to which
he had been ordered for the purpose of disciplining his will and
character, or for punishment, he was far beyond the city's limits
roaming the woods, the fields, or the river-banks--joyously, and without
a prick of conscience (for all his disobedience) feeding his growing
soul upon the beauties of tree, and sky, and cliff, and water-fall.

And so, in spite of the melancholy moods in which he was occasionally
plunged by the bitterness which had found lodgment in his breast, the
summer was upon the whole a happy one to the boy. He was so young and
the world was so beautiful! He could not remember always to be unhappy.
Edgar Goodfellow, as well as Edgar the Dreamer, revelled in the world of
Out-of-Door. To the one all manner of muscular sport and exercise was
as the breath of his nostrils; to the other, whose favorite stories were
ancient myths and fairy-tales, all natural phenomena possessed vivid
personality. He loved to trace pictures in the clouds. In the rustling
of corn or the stirring of leaves in the trees, or in the sound of
running waters he heard voices which spoke to him of delightsome things,
bringing to his full, grey eyes, as he hearkened, a soft, romantic look,
and touching his lips and his cheeks with a radiant spirituality.

The cottage, on Clay Street, to which the Allans had removed soon after
their return from England, was in a quiet part of the town. The window
of Edgar's own, quaint little room in the dormer roof, with its shelving
walls, gave him a fair view of the sky, and brought him sweet airs
wafted across the garden of old-fashioned flowers bel