r Long Island, and
on Fire Island beach she struck at four o'clock on the morning of July
19. Margaret, with husband and child, was lost, after refusing to be
separated in the efforts at rescue. They went down together, and the
career of a great and noble woman ended thus tragically on that desolate
coast.

[Illustration]

[Illustration]

EDGAR ALLAN POE.

Among the names that were occasionally mentioned in the brief and
fleeting annals of the stage from the year 1798 to the year 1811, were
those of Mr. David Poe and the beautiful Miss Arnold--afterward Mrs.
Poe,--the father and mother of that most brilliant but erratic genius
Edgar A. Poe.

David Poe was the son of old General Poe, who won his honors in
Revolutionary times and was a man of sterling character and many heroic
qualities. Miss Arnold belonged to the stage by birth, and from earliest
youth had been attached to the theatre in some capacity. It is a most
miserable fate for a child, but she knew of nothing better. She came
before the public with a naivete that was touching, and played her
little airs on the piano and sung her little songs and uttered her
childish sentences always to the very best of her ability, putting up
with the late hours and the hasty and often scanty meals and the general
discomfort of her lot with the utmost amiability and good-nature. No
sheltered home, no days of careless pleasure, no constant and watchful
care over health or manners or morals, fell to her lot; but the frowns
and sometimes the curses of the older actors, the ill-nature of the
manager, and the wearied fretfulness of her mother, who was growing old
in the drudgery of her profession,--for she never rose above that at any
time. Nor does it appear that Miss Arnold had any particular talent,
though she won a moderate share of favor upon the stage; but she was
always much esteemed by those who knew her in private. She sung and
sometimes danced, as did her husband, who was an actor of inferior
merit. There is something very pathetic in the story of the little
second-rate actress who was so conscientious and so persevering, and one
cannot but hope that she received her due share of the applause which
lends such a fascination to the life of the actor that he rarely
abandons it for any other career.

There is a hint of the hardship of her life in the fact that there are
but three short breaks in her dramatic career through all those
years,--the times when the th