The cottage, on Clay Street, to which the Allans had removed soon after their return from England, was in a quiet part of the town.  The window of Edgar’s own, quaint little room in the dormer roof, with its shelving walls, gave him a fair view of the sky, and brought him sweet airs wafted across the garden of old-fashioned flowers below.  Here, such hours as he spent from choice or by command were not lonely, for, sitting by the little window, many a story or poem was thought out; or buried in some favorite book his thoughts would be borne away as if on wings to a world where imagination was king.

* * * * *

In the fall he was entered at Mr. Clarke’s school.  The school-room, with its white-washed walls and the sun pouring in, unrestricted, through the commonplace, big, bare windows, was very different from the great, gloomy Gothic room at old Stoke-Newington—­so full of mystery and suggestion—­but Edgar found it a pleasant place in which to be upon that cool fresh morning in late September, when he made its acquaintance.  He felt full of mental activity and ready to go to work with a will upon his Latin, his French and his mathematics.  Since his return from England, in June, he had become acquainted with most of the boys who were to be his school-fellows, and he took at once to the school-master, Professor Clarke, of Trinity College, Dublin—­a middle-aged bachelor of Irish birth, an accomplished gentleman and a very human creature, with a big heart, a high ideal of what boys might be and abundant tolerance of what they generally were.  If he had a quick temper, he had also a quick wit, and a quick appreciation of talent and sympathy with timorous aspirations.

It had been Master Clarke’s suggestion that his new pupil, who was known as Edgar Allan, should put his own name upon the school register.  Edgar, looking questioningly up into Mr. Allan’s face, was glad to read approval there, and with a thrill of pride he wrote upon the book, in the small, clear hand that had become characteristic of him: 

“Edgar Allan Poe.”

He was proud of his name and proud of his father, of whom he remembered nothing, but in whose veins, he knew, had run patriot blood, and who had had the independence to risk all for love of the beautiful mother of worshipped memory.  It was with straightened shoulders and a high head that he took the seat assigned him at the clumsy desk, in the bare, ugly room of the school in which he was to be known for the first time as Edgar Poe.  He felt that in coming into his own name he had come into a proud heritage.

Mr. Clarke’s Irish heart warmed toward him.  He divined in the big-browed, big-eyed boy a unique and gifted personality and proceeded with the uttermost tact to do his best toward the cultivation of his talents.  The result was that Edgar not only acquitted himself brilliantly in his studies, but progressed well in his verse-making, which though, since Mr. Allan’s prohibition, it had been kept secret in his home, was freely acknowledged to teacher and school-fellows.