For these indulgences Frances Allan was chiefly responsible.  The one weak spot in the armor of austerity in which John Allan clothed himself was his love for his wife, and it was often against what he felt to be his better judgment that he acquiesced in her system of child-spoiling.  He felt a solemn responsibility toward the boy, and he did his duty by him, as he saw it, faithfully.  It was not in the least his fault that he did not see that under the broad white brow and sunny ringlets was a brain in which, like the sky in a dew-drop, a whole world was reflected, with ever changing pageantry, and that the abstracted expression in the boy’s eyes that he thought could only mean that he was “hatching mischief,” really indicated that the creative faculty in budding genius was awake and at work.

For a child Edgar’s age to be making trials at writing poetry Mr. Allan regarded as sheer idleness, to be promptly suppressed.  Indeed, when he discovered that the boy had been guilty of such foolishness, he emphatically ordered him not to repeat it.  To counteract the effects of his wife’s spoiling of her adopted son, he felt it his duty to place all manner of restrictions upon his liberty, which the freedom-loving boy, with the connivance of his mother and the negro servants who adored him, disregarded whenever it was possible.  Though bathing in the river was (except upon rare occasions) prohibited, Edgar became before summer was over, the most expert swimmer and diver of his years in town, and many an afternoon when Mr. Allan supposed that he was in his room, to which he had been ordered for the purpose of disciplining his will and character, or for punishment, he was far beyond the city’s limits roaming the woods, the fields, or the river-banks—­joyously, and without a prick of conscience (for all his disobedience) feeding his growing soul upon the beauties of tree, and sky, and cliff, and water-fall.

And so, in spite of the melancholy moods in which he was occasionally plunged by the bitterness which had found lodgment in his breast, the summer was upon the whole a happy one to the boy.  He was so young and the world was so beautiful!  He could not remember always to be unhappy.  Edgar Goodfellow, as well as Edgar the Dreamer, revelled in the world of Out-of-Door.  To the one all manner of muscular sport and exercise was as the breath of his nostrils; to the other, whose favorite stories were ancient myths and fairy-tales, all natural phenomena possessed vivid personality.  He loved to trace pictures in the clouds.  In the rustling of corn or the stirring of leaves in the trees, or in the sound of running waters he heard voices which spoke to him of delightsome things, bringing to his full, grey eyes, as he hearkened, a soft, romantic look, and touching his lips and his cheeks with a radiant spirituality.