of their clasp.

As she bent her fine, deeply-lined face over them, and the work they
held, while the little Virginia sat nursing a doll at her feet, she
often stitched into the garments that they fashioned yearnings,
thoughts, questionings of the youth--her brother's child--whose picture,
as she had conceived him from descriptions she had heard, she carried in
her heart. She knew too well the weakness that was his inheritance and
she knew too, what perils were in waiting to ensnare the feet of untried
youth--poor, homeless and without the restraining influences of friends
and kindred--whatever their inheritance might be.

Sometimes she felt that the yearning was almost more than she could
bear, and that she must arise and go forth and seek this straying sheep
of the fold of Poe. But alas, she was but a woman, without money and
without a clue upon which to begin to work save such as wild, improbable
and contradictory rumors afforded. That was, after all, what she most
needed--a clue. If she could only find a clue, poor as she was, she
would follow it to the ends of the earth!

Upon a summer's day two years after Edgar's disappearance, and when she
had almost given up hope, the clue came. It was placed in her hand by
her cousin, and Edgar's, Neilson Poe, who had no faith in its value but
passed it on to her as it had come to him--"for what it was worth," as
he expressed it.

It was a strange story that Mrs. Clemm's cousin Neilson told her, and
which had been told him, he said, by an acquaintance of his from
Richmond who had known Edgar Poe in his boyhood.

It seems that this Richmond man had during a visit to Baltimore gone to
a brickyard to arrange for the shipment home of bricks for a new house
he was building. As he sat in the office talking to the manager of the
yard, a line of men bearing freshly molded bricks to the kiln passed the
open window. There was something about the appearance of one of the
laborers that struck the Richmond man as familiar and he turned quickly
to the manager and asked the name of the man, pointing him out. The name
given him was a strange one to him and he dismissed the matter from his
thoughts and returned to his business talk.

Upon his way to his hotel, however, the appearance of the brick-carrier,
and the impression that somewhere, he had seen him before, returned to
his mind and it came upon him in a flash, first that the likeness was to
Edgar Poe, and then the conviction that