ght to be intoxicated. Next
morning he awoke to find himself a prisoner in a vagrant cell, and the
shock to his sensitive nature sent him, a madman indeed, to the
Blackwell's Island Asylum, where in a few days he died.

Years after, the author of _Glimpses of Home Life_, Emma C. Embury,
whose home was in Brooklyn, told of a knoll in Greenwood Cemetery by
the side of a little lake where the oak-trees shaded a modest tomb on
which there were some lines of verse. They were lines written by
McDonald Clarke. The tomb is there yet, still shaded by oaks that have
grown sturdier with the passing years, and the grave by the lake is
the grave of The Mad Poet.

Chapter VIII

Those Who Gathered about Poe

When New York was a much younger city than it is, when it was well
within bounds on the lower part of the island of Manhattan, long
before there was a thought that it would overspread the island, jump
over a stream and go wandering up the mainland, overleap a river and
go spreading over another island to the sea,--long before the time
when these things came to be, there lay scattered in several
directions on the island of Manhattan and dotting the rolling country
land beyond, several tiny villages. These were Harlem, and Yorkville,
and Odellville, and Bloomingdale, and Chelsea, and Greenwich. The last
was the hamlet closest to the city. Quaint and curious, it spread its
scattered way along the Hudson River where houses had been set up
according to the needs and vagaries of men on roads natural and
unplanned. When the city grew larger and finally swept around
Greenwich Village, the roads becoming city streets, the village
continued a labyrinthian way, where strangers wandered and were lost
before they knew it.

[Illustration: On Bloomingdale Road near 75th St. in Poe's time]

In the very core of this old-time Greenwich section and at the very
place where the streets are so tangled, so irregular, so crooked, so
often no thoroughfare, so winding that they seem to be seeking out the
old farmhouses which they led to in early days, there is a pretty
little playground for children. This Hudson Park is an open spot with
green lawns and marble walks and a tall iron fence surrounding it;
quite a model park with everything about fresh, and new, and modern.
It is so very new and so very neat and so very clean that one would
not look there for old-time flavor. But curiously enough one thing
about it seems out of tone. On the gr