and Catarina weren't here. We hope to send for you very soon."

It is hard to read of the straits to which Poe was often reduced for a
little money, and to know that all this time he was writing those
immortal tales which would now make a man's fortune as soon as produced.
It is true that he had two or three times good salaried positions,--good
for that day,--but he never kept them long, and his chronic state was
one of poverty, if not of destitution.

Mrs. Osgood, who knew him in the later days in New York, says of him:--

"I have never seen him otherwise than gentle, generous, well-bred,
and fastidiously refined. To a sensitive and delicately nurtured
woman there was a peculiar and irresistible charm in the chivalric,
graceful, and almost tender reverence with which he invariably
approached all women who won his respect."

The home in the suburbs where he lived in the last days of his wife's
life is described as a story-and-a-half house at the top of Fordham
Hill. Within on the ground floor were two small apartments,--a kitchen
and sitting-room,--and above, up a narrow stairway, two others, one
Poe's room,--a low, cramped chamber lighted by little square windows
like port-holes,--the other a diminutive closet of a bedroom, hardly
large enough to lie down in. The furnishing was of the scantiest, but
everything faultlessly neat.

"Mrs. Clemm, now over sixty, in her worn black dress made upon all
who saw her an impression of dignity, refinement, and deep motherly
devotion to her children. Virginia, at the age of twenty-five,
retained her beauty, but the large black eyes and raven hair
contrasted sadly with the pallor of her face. Poe himself, poor,
proud, and ill, anticipating grief and nursing the bitterness that
springs from helplessness in the sight of suffering borne by those
dear to us, was restless and variable, the creature of
contradictory impulses."

Virginia now failed rapidly, Poe was ill, and the household was reduced
almost to the starving-point. Winter was upon them; and when at last a
sympathizing friend found them she thus describes the situation:--

"There was no clothing upon the bed, which was only straw, but a
snow-white counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold, and the
sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever
of consumption. She lay on the straw bed wrapped in her husban