The Dreamer | Page 8

main floors he happened to be. It was afterward to become a
source of secret satisfaction to him that he never finally decided upon
which floor was the dim sleeping apartment to which he was
introduced soon after supper, and which he shared with eighteen or
twenty other boys.
The business of formally entering the pupil about whom the Allans and
Dr. Bransby had already corresponded, in the school, was soon
dispatched, and once more the iron gate swung open upon its weirdly
complaining hinges, then went to again with a bang and a clang, and
the little boy from far Virginia, with the wistful grey eyes and the
sunny curls was alone in a throng of curious school-fellows, and in the
dimness, the strangeness, the vastness of a hoary, mysterious mansion
full of echoes, and of quaint crannies and closets where shadows lurked
by day as well as by candle-light. Alone, yet not unhappy--for Edgar
the Dreamer was holding full sway. With the departure of his
foster-father, all check was removed from his fancy which could, and
did, run riot in this creepy and fascinating old place, and at night he had
to comfort him the miniature of his mother from which he had never
been parted for an hour, and which he still carried to bed with him with
unfailing regularity.
He had always known that his mother was English-born, and somehow,
in his mind, there seemed to be some mystic connection between this
ancient town and manor house and the green graveyard in Richmond,
with its mouldy tombstones and encompassing wall.
* * * * *
Not until the next morning was the new pupil ushered into the
school-room--the largest room in the world it seemed to the small,
lonely stranger. It was long, narrow and low-pitched. Its ceiling was of
oak, black with age, and the daylight struggled fitfully in through
pointed, Gothic windows. Built into a remote and terror-inspiring

corner was a box-like enclosure, eight or ten feet high, of heavy oak,
like the ceiling, with a massy door of the same sombre wood. This, the
newcomer soon learned was the "sanctum" of the head-master--the Rev.
Dr. Bransby--whose sour visage, snuffy habiliments and upraised ferule
seemed so terrible to young 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 broken by young Edgar
himself. Drawing himself up