lips, led her to a chair.

Her eyes were fixed upon the pile of manuscripts.

"One of them is yourself, Madam," replied the poet.

"Myself?" she questioned, in amazement.

He bowed, gravely. "Yourself--as one of the Literati of New York. In
each one of these one of you is rolled up and discussed. I will show you
by the difference in their length the varying degrees of estimation in
which I hold you literary folk. Come Virginia, and help me!"

The fair visitor smiled as they drew out to the full length roll after
roll of the manuscript--letting them fly together again as if they had
been spiral springs. The largest they saved for the last. The poet
lifted it from its place and gave an end to his wife and like two merry,
laughing children they ran to opposite corners, stretching the
manuscript diagonally across the entire space between.

"And whose 'linked sweetness long drawn out' is that?" asked the
visitor.

"Hear her!" cried Edgar Goodfellow who was in the ascendent for the
first time in many a long day. "Hear her! Just as if her vain little
heart didn't tell her it's herself!"

But the moment of playfulness was a rarity, and all the more enjoyed for
that.

The papers came out in due course, serially, and created a new sensation
and brought their little reward, but they also plunged their author into
a succession of unsavory quarrels. As each one appeared, it was looked
for with eagerness and read with intense interest by the public, but
frequently with as intense anger by the subject.

Perhaps the most caustic of all the critiques was the one upon the work
of Mr. Thomas Dunn English, whom Poe contemptuously dubbed, "Thomas Done
Brown."

Mr. English bitterly retorted with an attack upon his critic's private
character. A fierce controversy followed in which English became so
abusive that Poe sued and recovered two hundred and twenty-five dollars
damages--which goes to prove that even an ill wind can blow good.

Long after the papers had been published the scene of playful idleness,
with all its holiday charm, when Edgar Poe drew out the strips of
manuscript in which were rolled up "The Literati of New York" remained
in Mrs. Osgood's memory, and in his own. To him it was indeed a gleam of
brightness amid a throng of "earnest woes," a season of calm in a
"tumultous sea."

But, as been said, why dwell upon the details of that bleak, despairing
winter? Spring brought a change which makes a more pleasant pic