as a youth of seventeen he had quarrelled with John Allan and
gone forth to the battle of life. In the long, long battle since then
there had been more of joy than they knew who looking on had seen the
toil and the defeat and the despair, but from whose eyes the exaltation
he had felt in the act of creation or in the contemplation of the works
of nature, and the happiness he found in his frugal home, were hidden.
But, as has been said, there had been no holiday, until now when he had
come back to Richmond an older and a sadder and a more experienced Edgar
Poe--an Edgar Poe upon whom the Silence and the Solitude had fallen and
had left shaken--broken.

Yet that personal identity upon the mystery of which he liked to
ponder--the unquenchable, immortal _ego_ was there; and it was, for all
the outward and inward changes, the same Edgar Poe, with his two
natures--Dreamer and Goodfellow--alternately dominating him, who had
come back to find the real end of the rainbow in revisiting old scenes,
renewing old friendships, awakening old memories--and had paused to make
holiday.

Even in these golden days there were occasional falls, for the cup of
kindness was everywhere and in his blood was the same old strain which
made madness for him in the single glass--the single drop, almost; and
in spite of all the great schoolmaster, Life, had taught him, there was
in his will the same old element of weakness. Had it been otherwise he
had not been Edgar Poe. At times, too, the blue devils raised their
heads. Had it been otherwise he had not been Edgar Poe.

But on the whole the holiday was a bright dream of Paradise regained at
a time when more than ever before his feet had seemed to march only to
the cadence of the old, sad word, Nevermore.

Two sacred pilgrimages he made early in this holiday--to the two shrines
of his romantic boyhood--to Shockoe Cemetery, where he not only visited
"Helen's" tomb, but laid a wreath upon the grave of Frances Allan--his
little foster mother, and to the churchyard on the hill. The white
steeple still slept serenely in the blue atmosphere above the church
and, as of yore, the bell called in deep, sweet tones to prayer. But how
the churchyard had filled since he saw it last! Graves, graves
everywhere. It was appalling! He stepped between the graves, old and
new, stooping to read the inscriptions upon the slabs. So many that he
remembered as merry boys and girls and hale men and women still in their
pri