* * * *

The hundred dollars brought indeed, a season of comfort and cheer in the
midst of the hardest times the cottage in Spring Garden had known. But
the last penny was finally spent.

Winter came on--the winter of 1843. It was a severe winter to the
cottage. The bow of promise that had spanned it seemed to have withdrawn
to such a vast height above it that its outlines were indistinct--its
colors well nigh faded out.

The reading public still trumpeted the praise of Edgar the Dreamer--his
friends still believed in him--from many quarters their letters and the
letters of the great ones of the day fluttered to the cottage. And not
only letters came, but the _literati_ of the day in person--glad to sit
at Edgar Poe's feet, their hearts glowing with the eloquence of his
speech and aching as they recognized in the lovely eyes of the girl-wife
"the light that beckons to the tomb."

But there were other visitors that winter, and less welcome ones. Though
the master of the cottage wrote and wrote, filling the New York and
Philadelphia papers and magazines with a stream of translations,
sketches, stories and critiques, for which he was sometimes paid and
sometimes not, the aggregate sum he received was pitifully small and the
Wolf scratched at the door and the gaunt features of Cold and Want
became familiar to the dwellers in the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass.

In desperation the driven poet turned this way and that in a wild effort
to provide the necessities of life for himself and those who were
dearer to him than self--occasionally appearing upon the lecture
platform, and finally attempting, but without success, to secure
government office in Washington.

And oftener and oftener, and for longer each time the Shadow rested upon
the cottage--making the Valley dark and drear and dimming the colors of
the grass and the flowers--the dread shadow of the wing of the Angel of
Death.

Even at such times The Dreamer made a manful struggle to coin his brains
into gold--to bring to the cottage the comforts, the conveniences, the
delicacies that the precious invalid should have had. An exceedingly
appealing little invalid, she lay upon her bed in the upper chamber
whose shelving ceiling almost touched her head; and sometimes "Muddie"
and "Eddie" fanned her and sometimes they chafed her hands and her feet
and placed her pet, "Catalina," grown now to a large, comfortable cat,
in her arms, that the warmth of