had amply served, as has
been said, to keep the Wolf from the door. In order to make as much
without a regular salary it would be necessary for him to sell a great
many articles and that they should be promptly paid for. And so he
wrote, and wrote, and wrote, while "Muddie" took the little rolls of
manuscript around and around seeking a market for them. Her stately
figure and saintlike face became familiar at the doors of all the
editors and publishers in Philadelphia.

It was a weary business but her strength and courage seemed never to
flag. Sometimes she succeeded in selling a story or a poem promptly and
receiving prompt pay. Then there was joy in the rose-embowered cottage.
Sometimes after placing an article payment was put off time and time
again until hope deferred made sick the hearts of all three dwellers in
the cottage.

Oftentimes they were miserably poor--sometimes they were upon the verge
of despair--yet through all there was an undercurrent of happiness that
nothing could destroy--they had each other and even at the worst they
still dreamed the dream of the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, even
though the heartsease blossom drooped and drooped.

Virginia's attacks continued to come at intervals, and each time the
shadow hung more persistently and with deeper gloom over the cottage. It
would be lifted at length, but not until the husband and mother had
suffered again all the agonies of parting--not until what they believed
to be the last goodbyes had been said and the imagination, running ahead
of the actual, had gone through each separate detail of death and
burial.

The Dreamer's thoughts dwelt constantly upon these scenes and details
until finally the "dirges of his hope one melancholy burden bore--of
Never--Nevermore."

Under the influence of the state of mind that was thus induced, a new
poem began to take shape in his brain--a poem of the death of a young
and beautiful woman and the despair and grief of the lover left to mourn
her in loneliness. As it wrote itself in his mind the word that had
thrilled and charmed and frightened him at the bedside of his mother and
to whose time his feet had so often marched, as to a measure--the
mournful, mellifluous word, Nevermore--became its refrain.

The composition of his new poem became an obsession with him. His brain
busied itself with its perfection automatically. Not only as he sat at
his desk, pen in hand; frequently it happened that at these time