mercenary one, and burning with indignation, his eyes gleaming with
something like their old fire, he half raised himself from the chair.

"How dare you?" he screamed in the grating tones of angry old age. Then,
grasping the cane at his side in trembling fingers and raising it with
threatening gesture, he ordered his visitor to leave the room at once.

Edgar Poe stood aghast for a moment, then fled down the stair and out of
the door and turning his back for the last time upon the house whose
young master he had been, with the word "Nevermore" ringing like a knell
in his ears, made his way again to the abode of love and peace in
Baltimore, which held his whole heart and which had become his home.

A few weeks later Mr. Allan died, leaving the whole of his fortune to
his second wife and her children.

* * * * *

It now became more important than ever for Edgar Poe to earn a living.
In spite of the fact that Mr. Allan was known to have lost all regard
for him, his friends had always believed that he would be remembered in
the will. They believed that John Allan's rigid, sometimes even
strained, idea of justice would cause him to provide for the boy for
whom he had voluntarily, albeit against his own judgment, made himself
responsible. The fact that the boy had turned out to be, in Mr. Allan's
opinion, "trifling," that he refused to engage in any "useful" work and
that at five and twenty years of age he had not established himself in
any "paying business" would, those who knew Mr. Allan best believed, be
with him but another reason for ensuring against want his first wife's
spoiled darling who was evidently incapable of taking care of himself
and therefore (so they believed he would argue) so much the more his
care.

Possibly The Dreamer may have taken this view himself. However that may
be, the opening of the will silenced all conjecture, and as has been
said, made the need of his making his work produce money more pressing
than ever. His friend Wilmer did his best for him--publishing his
stories in _The Saturday Visitor_ from time to time and paying him as
well as he was able. But Wilmer and his paper were poor themselves. _The
Visitor_ was only a small weekly, with a modest subscription list. It
had little to pay, however good the "copy" and that little and Mother
Clemm's earnings put together barely kept the wolf from the door.

When the frequent and welcome summons to the bountiful