It was the same way with his lessons.  Without apparent effort he distanced all of his class-mates and instead of pluming himself upon it, was always ready to help them with their Latin or their sums, whose answers he seemed to find by magic, almost.

CHAPTER IV.

During the winter before Edgar went to Stoke-Newington, he had attended an “infant school,” in Richmond, taught by a somewhat gaunt, but mild-mannered spinster, with big spectacles over her amiable blue eyes, a starchy cap and a little bunch of frosty cork-screw curls on each side of her face.  As a child, she had played with Mr. Allan’s father on their native heath, in Ayrshire, and to her, little Edgar was always her “ain wee laddie.”  She had spoiled him inordinately and unblushingly.  Also, as she contentedly drew at the pipe filled with the offerings of choice smoking-tobacco which he frequently turned out of his pockets into her lap, she had taught him to read in her own broad Scottish accent, and to cypher.

She had furthermore drilled him in making “pothooks and hangers,” with which he covered his slate in neat rows, daily.  But it was at the Manor House, in Stoke-Newington, that he was initiated into the mysteries of writing.  His hands were as shapely as a girl’s, with deft, taper fingers that seemed made to hold a pen or brush, and he soon developed a neat, small, but beautifully clear and graceful hand-writing.

This new accomplishment became at once a delight to him, and as time went on opened a new world to Edgar the Dreamer, who now began, when he could snatch an opportunity to do so unobserved, to put down upon paper the visions of his awakening soul.  Sometimes these scribblings took the form of little stories—­crudely conceived and incoherently expressed, but rich in the picturesque thought and language of an exceptionably imaginative and precocious child.  Sometimes they were in verse.  For subjects these infant effusions had generally to do with the lonely grave in the churchyard in Richmond and the sad joy of the heart that mourns evermore; with the beauty of flowers—­the more beautiful because doomed to a brief life; with the Gothic steeple, asleep in the still, blue air, and the bell in whose deep iron throat dwelt a note that was hollow and ghostly; with the great wall around the Manor House grounds and with the mighty gate that swung upon hinges in which the voice of a soul in torment seemed to be imprisoned, and with other things which filled him with a terror that

      “was not fright,
    But a tremulous delight.”

His learning to write bore still another fruit.