as one's life was worth to rebel. Poe
was so badly drugged that he had to be carried on two or three rounds,
and then the gang said it was no use trying any longer to vote a dead
man and must get rid of him. And with that they shoved him into a cab
and sent him away."

"Then he died from dissipation, after all?"

"Nothing of the kind. He died from the effects of laudanum or some other
poison forced on him in the coop. He was in a dying condition when being
voted twenty or thirty times. The story told by Griswold and others of
his being picked up in the street is a lie. I saw him thrust into the
cab myself."

And Mrs. Clemm?

When she received Poe's letter bidding her to expect him at Fordham that
week, she hastened thither to set her house in order for his reception.
Day after day she watched and waited, but he did not come. And at
length, when the week had passed, she one evening sat alone in the
little cottage around which and through the naked branches of the cherry
tree the October wind was sighing, and in anguish of spirit wrote to
"Annie":

"Eddie is dead--_dead_."

CHAPTER XXXI.

AFTER THE WAR.

In the fall of 1865--the year which saw the conclusion of the unhappy
war--I returned to Richmond and to my old home of Talavera, which I had
not seen in four years.

What a shock to me was the first sight of it! In place of the pleasant,
smiling home, there stood a bare and lonely house in the midst of
encircling fortifications, still bristling with dismantled
gun-carriages. Every outbuilding had disappeared. All the beautiful
trees which had made it so attractive--even the young cedar of Lebanon,
which had been our pride--were gone; greenhouses, orchard, vineyard,
everything, had been swept away, leaving only a dead level overgrown
with broom-straw, amidst which were scattered rusted bayonets and a few
hardy plants struggling through the trampled ground. The place was no
longer "_Talavera_," but "_Battery 10_."

In this desolate abode I remained some time, awaiting the arrival of
our scattered family, and with no protectors save a faithful old negro
couple. Each evening we would barricade as well as we could the entrance
to the fort, as some slight protection against the hordes of newly freed
negroes who roamed the country, living on whatever they could pick up.

One evening when we had taken this precaution, some one was heard
calling without, and, mounting the ramparts, I beheld a forlorn lookin