Not until the next morning was the new pupil ushered into the
school-room--the largest room in the world it seemed to the small,
lonely stranger. It was long, narrow and low-pitched. Its ceiling was
of oak, black with age, and the daylight struggled fitfully in through
pointed, Gothic windows. Built into a remote and terror-inspiring corner
was a box-like enclosure, eight or ten feet high, of heavy oak, like the
ceiling, with a massy door of the same sombre wood. This, the newcomer
soon learned was the "sanctum" of the head-master--the Rev. Dr.
Bransby--whose sour visage, snuffy habiliments and upraised ferule
seemed so terrible to young Edgar that on the following Sunday when he
went to service in the Gothic church, it was with a spirit of deep
wonder and perplexity that he regarded from the school gallery the
reverend man with countenance so demurely benign, with robes so glossy
and so clerically flowing, with wig so minutely powdered, so rigid and
so vast, who, with solemn step and slow, ascended the high pulpit.

Interspersed about the school-room, crossing and recrossing in endless
irregularity, were benches and desks, black, ancient and time-worn,
piled desperately with much bethumbed books, and so beseamed with
initial letters, names at full length, grotesque figures and other
multiplied efforts of the knife, as to have lost what little of original
form might have been their portion in days long departed. A huge bucket
with water stood at one extremity of the room and a clock, whose
dimensions appeared to the boy to be stupendous, at the other.

But it was not only Edgar the Dreamer who came to Manor House School,
who passed out of the great iron gate and through the elm avenues to the
Gothic church on Sundays, and who regularly, on two afternoons in the
week, made a decorous escape from the confinement of the frowning walls,