ture.

* * * * *

Ever since they had left Philadelphia the Poes had clung, in memory, to
the rose-embowered cottage in Spring Garden. There, they told each
other, they had a home to their minds. It was the dear "Muddie," their
ever faithful earthly Providence to whom they were already so deeply
indebted, who discovered in the suburb of Fordham, a tiny cottage which
had much of the charm of which they dreamed--even to the infinitesimal
price for which it could be rented.

It was only a story and a half high, but there was a commodious and
cheerful room down stairs, with four windows, and from the narrow
hallway a quaint little winding stair led to an attic which though its
roof was low and sloping contained a room large enough to serve the
double purpose of bed-chamber and study.

There was a pleasant porch across the front of the cottage which would
make an ideal summer sitting-room and study, when the half-starved
rose-bush upon it should have been nursed and trained to screen it from
the sun.

The cottage stood upon a green hill, half-buried in cherry trees--just
then in full bloom and filled with bird-song. Nearby was a grove of
pines and a short walk away was the Harlem River, with its picturesque,
high, stone bridge. It was an abode fit to be in Paradise, Edgar told
Virginia and the Mother, and within a few days they and their few small
possessions--including Catalina--were as well established there as if
they had never known any other home.

The moving in recalled the earliest days of their life at Spring Garden.
Again "Muddie" was busy, not with soap and water only, but with the
whitewash brush. Again their hearts were blythe with the pleasing sense
of change--of the opening up of a new vista of there was no knowing what
happiness--just as children welcome any change for the change itself,
always expecting to find pleasant surprises upon a new and untried road.

But there was a difference in themselves since the moving into the
Spring Garden Cottage, which had been so gradual that they were scarcely
conscious of it. The years since then lay heavily upon them. They showed
plainly in the deepened lines in Mother Clemm's face, in the deepened
anxiety in her Mater Dolorosa eyes, in the frost upon the locks that
peeped from under her immaculate widow's cap. They showed in the
fragile figure of Virginia--once so full of sweet curves;--in the
ethereal look that had come into the o