friends."

The picture gave him the sign! With rising excitement he decided that
it must be accepted. To Boston, of course, he would go. Boston, the
place of his birth and where his angel mother had found her "best, most
sympathetic friends."

He would get away as early the next morning as possible, he told
himself. He would waste no time in goodbyes, for, he remembered with
some bitterness, there were few to say goodbye to. The boys were all off
at college again, now that the holidays were over, and as for Myra, she
had quickly consoled herself and was already a wife! He had addressed
some reproachful verses to her as a bride; then dismissed her from his
thoughts.

He arose and placed the picture carefully in the trunk with the rest of
his treasures and then went to bed to fall into the easy slumber of one
whose mind is well made up.

* * * * *

A few days later Edgar Poe had looked with delight and ineffable emotion
upon the real Boston Harbor, with its rocky little islets and its varied
shipping and its busy wharves, and--for him--its suggestions of one in
Heaven.

CHAPTER XIII.

Upon his arrival in Boston, our errant knight, before setting out upon
his quest for the Fame and Fortune to whose service he was sworn, spent
some hours in wandering about the old town, with mind open to the
quickening influences of historic association and eye to the irregular,
picturesque beauty about him.

It was one of those rare days that come sometimes in the month of
February when, though according to the callendar it should be cold,
there is a warmth in the sunshine that seems borrowed from Spring. Tired
out by his tramp, young Edgar at length sat down upon a bench in the
Common, under an elm, great of girth and wide-spreading. The sunshine
fell pleasantly upon him, through the bare branches. Roundabout were
other splendid, but now bare elms and he sat gazing upward into their
sturdy brown branches and dreamily picturing to himself the beauty of
these goodly trees clothed in the green vesture of summer. Suddenly, by
a whimsical sequence of suggestion, the pleasure he felt in the sunshine
of February as it reached him under the tree in Boston Common, vividly
called to mind the refreshing coolness of the shade of the elms, in full
leaf, as he, a little lad of six, had walked the streets of old
Stoke-Newington for the first time.

There was little relation between that first and this