dancing school, in which his natural love of dancing made him delight,
and was given stiff but merry little parties, at which old Cy, the black
fiddler played and called the figures, and the little host and his
friends conformed to the strict, ceremonious etiquette observed by the
children as well as the grown people of the day.

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