The world of boyhood has little understanding or sympathy for a soul like Paul’s; a soul woven of dreams and harmonies which knows no means of attuning itself to the material.  This lad walked with his head in the clouds and his thoughts in visions.  His playmates were invisible to human eyes and he heard the crashing of vast symphonies where others felt only the silences.  Now in a little while he was to have his face punched by a material and normal young savage whose very freckles shone with anticipation.

Ham Burton, looking on from his desk, recognized that in the frail lad who “wouldn’t stick up for himself” burned the thin hot fire of genius without the stamina that alone could fan it into effective blaze.  For Ham, whose face revealed as little of what went on back of his eyes as an Indian’s, was the dreamer, too, though his dreams were cut to a different pattern.  As he dealt in visions, so William the Conqueror may have dealt when a boy in his father’s bakeshop; so Napoleon may have dreamed before the world had heard his name.  The younger lad dreamed as the hasheesh-eater, for the vague and iridescent glory of visioning, but the elder dreamed otherwise, in preface to achievement.

The teacher rose at length to dismiss the classes, and as the children piled out into the crisp air, the Marquess kid was first on the hard-trodden soil of the school-yard—­for there triumph awaited his coming.  Paul was less impulsive.  He collected his books with the most deliberate care, dusting them off with an unwonted solicitude.  Then he spent an indefinite period searching for a stub of slate-pencil, which at another time would not have interested him.  He hoped against hope that Jimmy Marquess would not have time to wait for him.

At last, the laggard in war felt Ham’s strong hand on his coat-collar.  Vainly protesting and sniffling, he was hustled toward the rotting threshold and catapulted upon his enemy so abruptly and skillfully that to the casual eye he might have seemed bursting with impatience for battle.

And as he stumbled, willy-nilly, upon the Marquess kid, the Marquess kid joyously gathered him in and began raining enthusiastic rights and lefts upon the blanched and blue-veined face.

Suddenly Paul Burton woke to the fact that at his back was an extremely solid wall; on his right an equally impassable fence; on his left his implacable brother and at his front—­nothing but the Marquess kid.

Of the four obstacles Jimmy seemed the most vulnerable, and upon him Paul hurled himself with the exalted frenzy of a single idea:  an idea of boring his way out of an insupportable position.  That Jimmy’s blows hurt him so little astonished him, and under the spur of fear he fought with such abandon that to Ham’s face came a slow grin of contentment and to that of the Marquess kid an expression of pained amazement, followed by one of sudden panic.  Of this particular mouse, the cat had had enough and amid jeers of derision the cat withdrew with more of haste than of dignity in his departure.