Even thus early he was a rebel.
Jeff scrambled up through the grades in haphazard fashion until he
reached the seventh. Here his teacher made a discovery. She was a
faded little woman of fifty, but she had that loving insight to
which all children respond. Under her guidance for one year the
boy blossomed. His odd literary fancy for Don Quixote, for Scott's
poems and romances she encouraged, quietly eliminating the dime
novels he had read indiscriminately with these. She broke through
the shell of his shyness to find out that his diffidence was not
sulkiness nor his independence impudence.
The boy was a dreamer. He lived largely in a world of his own,
where Quentin Durward and Philip Farnum and Robert E. Lee were
enshrined as heroes. From it he would emerge all hot for action,
for adventure. Into his games then he would throw a poetic
imagination that transfigured them. Outwardly he lived merely in
that boys' world made to his hand. He adopted its shibboleths,
fought when he must, went through the annual routine of marbles,
tops, kites, hop scotch, and baseball. From his fellows he guarded
jealously the knowledge of even the existence of his secret world
of fancy.
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