By his class-mates he was deemed a wonder.  He was so easily first among them in everything—­in the simple athletics with which they were familiar, as well as in studies—­and his talent for rhyming and drawing seemed to set him upon a sort of pedestal.

In the first blush of triumph these little successes gave him, young Edgar’s head was in a fair way to be turned.  He saw himself (in fancy) the leader, the popular favorite of the whole school.  Indeed, he flattered himself he had leaped at a single bound to this position at the moment, almost, of his entrance.  But he soon began to see that he was mistaken.  While he was conscious of the unconcealed admiration of most, and the ill-concealed envy of a few of the boys, of his mental and physical abilities, he began, as time went on, to suspect—­then to be sure—­that for some reason that baffled all his ingenuity to fathom, he was not accorded the position in the school that was the natural reward for superiority of endowment and performance.  This place was filled instead by Nat Howard, a boy who, he told himself, he was without the slightest vanity bound to see was distinctly second to him in every way.

He noticed that whatever Nat proposed was invariably done, so that he was forced either to follow where he should have led, or be left out of everything.  Often when he joined the boys listening with interest to Nat’s heavy jokes and talk, a silence would fall upon the company, which in a short while would break up—­the boys going off in twos and threes, leaving him to his own society or that of a small minority composed of two or three boys for the most part younger than himself, who in spite of the popular taste for Nat, preferred him and were captivated by his clever accomplishments.

That there was some reason why he was thus shut out from personal intimacy by school-mates who acknowledged and admired his powers he felt sure, and he was determined to ferrit it out.  In the meantime his heart, always peculiarly responsive to affection, answered with warmth to the devotion of the small coterie who were independent enough to swear fealty to him.  He helped them with their lessons, initiated them into the mysteries of boxing and other manly exercises, went swimming and gunning with them, and occasionally delighted them by showing them his poems and the little sketches with which he sometimes illustrated his manuscript, in the making.

It must be confessed that there was little in these compositions to set the world afire.  They would only be counted remarkable as the work of a school-boy in his early teens, and were practice work—­nothing more.  They served their purpose, then sank into the oblivion which was their meet destiny.  But to Jack Preston, Dick Ambler, Rob Stanard and Rob Sully, and one or two others, they were master-pieces.