would gladly advance him a sum sufficient to make
himself presentable for the dinner--to be paid by the first check
received as a result of the meeting. A very modest sum would do. He
might manage it, he thought, with twenty dollars.

Finally, he drew his unfinished note before him again and added to what
he had written,

"If you will be my friend so far as to loan me twenty dollars, I will be
with you tomorrow--otherwise it will be impossible, and I must submit to
my fate. Sincerely yours,

"E.A. POE."

CHAPTER XX.

The dinner went off charmingly. In addition to several journalists, Mr.
Latrobe and Mr. Miller who, with Mr. Kennedy, had formed the committee
that awarded the prize to Edgar Poe, were there and the meeting between
the young guest of honor and his patrons engendered a spirit of
_bon-homie_ that was palpable to all. Under its spell The Dreamer's
spirits rose. Yet he was quiet, listening with deep attention to the
conversation of his elders, but having little to say, until the repast
was half over, when he responded to the evident desire of his host to
draw him out. The conversation had turned upon a favorite theme of
his--the power of words. He threw himself into it with zest, and with
brilliant play of expression animating his splendid eyes and pale
features, and the graceful, unrestrained gestures of one thoroughly at
ease and entirely unconscious of self, he held the table spell-bound
with a flow of sparkling talk in which his own exquisite choice of words
delighted his hearers no less than the originality and beauty of his
thought.

In the young editor of _The Saturday Visitor_ he promptly found a second
friend among men of letters. Mr. Wilmer, already prejudiced in his favor
by the success of the "MS. Found in a Bottle," and its cordial reception
by the public, and by Mr. Kennedy's warm words of recommendation,
yielded at once to the witchery of the poetic eyes, the courtly manners
and the charmed tongue, and not only befriended him by inviting and
accepting his writings for publication, but gave him, as time went on,
what proved to be a stimulant to good work as well as one of his
greatest pleasures--the intimate companionship of a man of congenial
tastes and near his own age.

* * * * *

The winter that followed was one of the happiest of The Dreamer's
life--a lull in a tempest, a dream of peace within a dream of storm and
stress.

He was soon a