se a direct contrast to his father.
Taller than the latter already, although not yet sixteen years of age,
he was lean and sallow of appearance, with long, narrow, ungainly
features, redeemed from plainness only by the intensity of his glowing
brown eyes. By several years the oldest lad at the church school, where
Mr. Arnold Page retailed his somewhat limited store of learning to some
forty scholars, Henry was the scandal of the village. To the good folk
of Hampton it seemed almost a temptation of Providence to keep a lad at
school after he was twelve years of age, and to them Henry was a byword
for laziness and the possibilities of a shameful end. Often would the
postmaster's cronies assure him that he could hope for no good to come
of such conduct. At the "Wings and Spur" almost any evening "that long,
lanky, lumbering lout of a good-for-nothing, 'Enry Charles," was quoted
in conversation as an example of the follies a man could commit who had
once gone so far out of his natural station as to visit London and
admire "book-larnin'."

"It's downright sinful, I calls it, to keep a led at school arter twelve
years of age, when 'e moite be earnin' three shillin' a week a-doin' of
some honest werk."

This was the opinion enunciated more than once by Mr. Miffin in the
taproom of the inn, and always assented to with acclamation by the
company.

But Henry was sublimely unconscious of the interest he created, and his
father was stoutly determined in the course he would pursue. So the
youth continued to read all the books that came his way, to dream dreams
of lands that lay beyond eye-scope of Hampton Bagot. If the main road
through the village went to Stratford-on-Avon, it did not stay there for
Henry, and when it did go there it carried his thoughts to the home of
his favourite author.

It was, perhaps, the very fact of Hampton's nearness to the shrine of
Shakespeare that set the postmaster's boy thinking of books and the
life of letters. Already he dwelt in an enchanted land whither none else
in Hampton had ever wandered, and from the printed page he had built up
for himself a city of his own--a city with the familiar name of London.
There, as his father had told him--for had not Edward John trod its
streets for two whole days?--lived the great men of letters, their busy
pens plying on countless sheets of paper, and, like the touch of magic
wands, conjuring up for their holders fame and fortune.

Edward John Charles was