The works of Edgar Allan Poe; newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry; the illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner.

WILLIAM WILSON

in, those meaning whispers which I then but too
cordially hated and too bitterly despised.
As it was, I at length grew restive in the extreme
under his distasteful supervision, and daily resented
more and more openly what I considered his intolerable arrogance. I have said that, in the first years
of our connection as schoolmates, my feelings in
regard to him might have been easily ripened into
friendship; but, in the latter months of my residence
at the academy, although the intrusion of his ordinary
manner had, beyond doubt, in some measure abated,
my sentiments, in nearly similar proportion, partook
very much of positive hatred. ) Upon one occasion
he saw this, I think, and afterwards avoided or made
a show of avoiding me.
It was about the same period, if I remember aright,
that, in an altercation of violence with him, in which
he was more than usually thrown off his guard,
and spoke and acted with an openness of demeanor
rather foreign to his nature, I discovered, or fancied
I discovered, in his accent, his air and general appearance, a something which first startled, and then
deeply interested me, by bringing to mind dim visions of my earliest infancy - wild, confused and
thronging memories of a time when memory herself
was yet unborn. I cannot better describe the sensation which oppressed me than by saying that I
could with difficulty shake off the belief of my having
been acquainted with the being who stood before me,
at some epoch very long ago- some point of the past
even infinitely remote. The delusion, however, faded
rapidly as it came; and I mention it at all but to define the day of the last conversation I there held wih
my singular namesake.
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