whose slight body slept the spirit of the artist unfortified with
martial iron of combat.

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