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amily. So her furniture went, piece by piece, the furniture which Miss Poe had so often described--the parlor box-lounge upon which she slept; the dining-table, which stood in the midst of the room, ready for the meal which was so seldom placed upon it; the large engraving above the mantelpiece, and the collection of sea-shells--all disappeared, until the once cosey little apartment presented a bare and poverty-stricken appearance. Mrs. Gove, one of the literary women of the day, described it as being furnished with only a checked matting, a small corner-stand, a hanging-shelf of books and four chairs. Years afterward, when strangers would visit the cottage at Fordham, they would hear from the neighbors pathetic accounts of the family during this summer of 1846. "We knew that they were poor," said one, "but they tried to keep it to themselves. Many a time I have wanted to send them things from my garden, but was afraid to do so." One old dame said to a New York reporter: "I've known when they were out of provisions, for then Mrs. Clemm, who always seemed cheerful, would come out with a basket and a shining case-knife and go 'round digging greens (dandelions). Once I said to her, says I, 'Greens may be took too frequent.' 'Oh, no,' says she, smiling, 'they cool the blood, and Eddie likes them.'" Thus poor Mrs. Clemm, with her assumed cheerfulness, would seek to produce the impression that their dinner of wild herbs was a matter of choice instead of necessity. Another neighbor said to a visitor: "I never saw checked matting last as theirs did. There was nothing upstairs but an old cot in a little hall-room or closet, where Mrs. Clemm slept, and an old table and chair and bed in the next room, where Mr. Poe wrote. But you could eat your dinner off the two floors." The testimony of still another was: "In the kitchen she had only a little stove, a pine table and a chair; but the floor was as white as the table, and the tins as bright as silver. I don't think that she had more than a dozen pieces of crockery, all on a little shelf in the kitchen. The only meat I've ever known them to have was a five-cent bone for soup or a few butcher's trimmings for a stew; but it seemed Mrs. Clemm could make a little of anything go twice as far as other people could." In the early part of this summer Virginia's health appeared better than usual. A neighbor who lived nearest them said to a visitor to Poe's old home: "In fine
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