tically. We had seen that Mozart had composed music at
six, and written it down very untidily too; we had seen that Marlborough
had, by sheer cheek, been made an officer at about our age; that David
Wilkie, one of the dullest of boys, had painted pictures while at
school; that Scott, a notorious blockhead, had written poetry at
thirteen; and that James Watt, at the same age, with very little
education, had pondered over the spout of a tea-kettle.

All this we had seen, and been very greatly impressed, for surely, if
some of these very ordinary boys had succeeded in startling their
generation, it would be strange, if we two--Sydney Sproutels and Harry
Hullock, who had just carried off the English composition prize at
Denhamby--couldn't write something between us that would make the world
"sit up."

That English composition prize had really been a great feather in our
caps. It was the first thing of the kind we had done--not the first
English composition, but the first sustained literary effort--and it had
opened our eyes to the genius that burned within us.

The exercise had been to expand the following brief anecdote into an
interesting narrative which should occupy two pages of Denhamby paper
with twenty lines in a page:--

"Orpheus, son of Oeagrus and Calliope, having lost his wife, Eurydice,
followed her to Hades, where, by the charm of his music, he received
permission to conduct her back to earth, on condition that he should not
look behind him during the journey. This condition he broke before
Eurydice had quite reached earth, and she was in consequence snatched
back into Hades."

I need not say that two pages of Denhamby paper were all too short to
express all we had to say on this delightful subject. I, being by
nature a poet, could have used all my space in describing the beauties
of the spring morning on which Orpheus made his unusual expedition;
while Hullock, whose genius was of a more practical order, confided to
me afterwards that if he had had room he had intended to introduce a
stirring conversation between the widower and his wife's ghost, in which
the latter would make certain very stringent conditions before
consenting to return once more to household duties.

However, by dint of severe self-denial, we both managed to restrain our
muses to the forty lines prescribed, and sent in our compositions with
quite a feeling of envy for the examiner who would have to read them.

When the results we