CHAPTER THIRTEEN.
OUR NOVEL.
A SUMMER HOLIDAY ACHIEVEMENT.
Sub-Chapter I.
THE PLOT.
It was a bold undertaking, no doubt, at our tender age, to propose to take the world by storm.

But others had done it before us.
We had read our _Wonderful Boys_ and our _Boyhood of Great Men_ carefully and critically.

We had seen that Mozart had composed music at six, and written it down very untidily too; we had seen that Marlborough had, by sheer cheek, been made an officer at about our age; that David Wilkie, one of the dullest of boys, had painted pictures while at school; that Scott, a notorious blockhead, had written poetry at thirteen; and that James Watt, at the same age, with very little education, had pondered over the spout of a tea-kettle.
All this we had seen, and been very greatly impressed, for surely, if some of these very ordinary boys had succeeded in startling their generation, it would be strange, if we two--Sydney Sproutels and Harry Hullock, who had just carried off the English composition prize at Denhamby--couldn't write something between us that would make the world "sit up." That English composition prize had really been a great feather in our caps.

It was the first thing of the kind we had done--not the first English composition, but the first sustained literary effort--and it had opened our eyes to the genius that burned within us.
The exercise had been to expand the following brief anecdote into an interesting narrative which should occupy two pages of Denhamby paper with twenty lines in a page:-- "Orpheus, son of Oeagrus and Calliope, having lost his wife, Eurydice, followed her to Hades, where, by the charm of his music, he received permission to conduct her back to earth, on condition that he should not look behind him during the journey.

This condition he broke before Eurydice had quite reached earth, and she was in consequence snatched back into Hades." I need not say that two pages of Denhamby paper were all too short to express all we had to say on this delightful subject.