oung Edgar that on the following Sunday when he
went to service in the Gothic church, it was with a spirit of deep
wonder and perplexity that he regarded from the school gallery the
reverend man with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy
and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and
so vast, who, with solemn step and slow, ascended the high pulpit.

Interspersed about the school-room, crossing and recrossing in endless
irregularity, were benches and desks, black, ancient and time-worn,
piled desperately with much bethumbed books, and so beseamed with
initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures and other
multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have lost what little of original
form might have been their portion in days long departed. A huge bucket
with water stood at one extremity of the room and a clock, whose
dimensions appeared to the boy to be stupendous, at the other.

But it was not only Edgar the Dreamer who came to Manor House School,
who passed out of the great iron gate and through the elm avenues to the
Gothic church on Sundays, and who regularly, on two afternoons in the
week, made a decorous escape from the confinement of the frowning walls,
and in company with the whole school, in orderly procession, and duly
escorted by an usher, tramped past the church and into the pleasant
green fields that lay beyond the quaint houses of the village. Edgar
Goodfellow was there too--Edgar the gay, the frolicsome, the lover of
sports and hoaxes and trials of strength.

Upon the evening of the young American's arrival, his schoolmates kept
their distance, regarding him with shy curiosity, but by the recess hour
next day this timidity had worn off, and they crowded about him with the
pointed questions and out-spoken criticisms which constitute the
breaking in of a new scholar. The boy received their sallies with such
politeness and good humor and with such an air of modest dignity, that
the wags soon ceased their gibes for very shame and the ring-leaders
began to show in their manner and speech, an air of approval in place of
the suspicion with which they had at first regarded him.

When the questions, "What's your name?"--"How old are you?"--"Where do
you live?" "Were you sick at sea?"--"What made you come to this school?"
"How high can you jump?"--"Can you box?" "Can you fight?"--and the like,
had been promptly and amiably answered, there was a lull. The silence
was b