Encompassed by the massy walls of this venerable academy, I passed, yet not in tedium or disgust, the years of the third lustrum of my life. The teeming brain of childhood requires no external world of incident to occupy or amuse it; and the apparently dismal monotony of a school was replete with more intense excitement than my riper youth has derived from luxury, or my full manhood from crime. Yet I must believe that my first mental development had in it much of the uncommon--even much of the _outré_. Upon mankind at large the events of very early existence rarely leave in mature age any definite impression. All is gray shadow--a weak and irregular remembrance--an indistinct regathering of feeble pleasures and phantasmagoric pains. With me this is not so. In childhood I must have felt, with the energy of a man, what I now find stamped upon memory in lines as vivid, as deep, and as durable as the _exergues_ of the Carthaginian medals. Yet in fact--in the fact of the world's view--how little was there to remember! The morning's awakening, the nightly summons to bed; the connings, the recitations; the periodical half-holidays, and perambulations; the play-ground, with its broils, its pastimes, its intrigues;--these, by a mental sorcery long forgotten, were made to involve a wilderness of sensation, a world of rich incident, an universe of varied emotion, of excitement the most passionate and spirit-stirring. "_Oh, le bon temps, que ce siècle de fer!_" In truth, the ardor, the enthusiasm, and the imperiousness of my disposition, soon rendered me a marked character among my schoolmates, and by slow but natural gradations gave me an ascendancy over all not greatly older than myself: over all with a single exception. This exception was found in the person of a scholar who, although no relation, bore the same Christian and surname as myself,--a circumstance, in fact, little remarkable; for, notwithstanding a noble descent, mine was one of those every-day appellations which seem by prescriptive right to have been, time out of mind, the common property of the mob. In this narrative I have therefore designated myself as William Wilson,--a fictitious title not very dissimilar to the real. My namesake alone, of those who in school-phraseology constituted "our set," presumed to compete with me in the studies of the class--in the sports and broils of the play-ground--to refuse implicit belief in my assertions, and submission to my will--indeed, to interfere with my arbitrary dictation in any respect whatsoever. If there is on earth a supreme and unqualified despotism, it is the despotism of a master-mind in boyhood over the less energetic spirits of its companions.