the man was none other than Poe
himself, though emaciated and aged to a degree that, with his shabby
dress and unshaven chin, made him scarcely recognizable. Though he had
been but a casual acquaintance of Edgar's, he was deeply touched at
seeing him so evidently in distress, and returned to the brickyard early
the next morning for the purpose of speaking to him and of helping him
back into the sphere in which he belonged and from which he had so long
disappeared. But the man he sought was not there and no one knew where
his lodgings were. He was a recent employe of the yard, they said, and
so gloomy and unsociable that he had made no friends. He was capable of
a great amount of work, which he performed faithfully, but kept to
himself and had little to say to anybody.

Upon the day before he had looked ill and had stopped work before the
day was over. He was evidently suffering from exhaustion, but had
declared that he needed nothing, and after sitting down to rest upon a
pile of bricks for a while, had gone off to his home--wherever that
might be--as usual, alone.

* * * * *

This story Neilson Poe set down as highly sensational. He did not
believe, he said with a laugh, that his cousin, when found, would be
doing anything half so energetic or useful as carrying bricks--he would
have more hope of him if he could believe it. The laborer's real, or
fancied, likeness to Edgar was but a case of chance resemblance, that
was all.

But that was not enough for Maria Clemm. She folded her sewing and laid
it away with an air of finality which plainly said that she had found
other and more pressing work to do. The sewing must wait a more
convenient season.

Then she went out into the streets sweltering in the summer heat, and
turned her face toward that obscure quarter of the town where human
beings who could not afford to rest or to dine might at least secure a
corner in which to "lodge" and the right, if not the appetite, to "eat,"
for an infinitesimal sum; for it was in this quarter that strange as it
might, seem, her instinct told her her search must be made--in this
quarter that Edgar Poe, the rich merchant's pampered foster-child, Edgar
Poe, the poet, the scholar, the exquisite in dress, in taste and in
manners, would be found.

When she did find him the mystery that had surrounded him was stripped
of the last shred of its romance. In a room compared to which the little
chamber back of