mething to please and had waited for an acknowledgment--that had never
come his way. Nothing of this kind was needed between men, his father
would say to Harry's mother--and his son was a man now. Had their child
been a daughter, it would have been quite another thing, but a son was
to be handled differently--especially an only son who was sole heir to
one's entire estate.

And yet it must not be thought that the outcast spent his time in sheer
idleness. St. George would often find him tucked away in one of his big
chairs devouring some book he had culled from the old general's library
in the basement--a room adjoining the one occupied by a firm of young
lawyers--Pawson & Pawson (only one brother was alive)--with an entrance
on the side street, it being of "no use to me" St. George had said--"and
the rent will come in handy." Tales of the sea especially delighted the
young fellow--the old admiral's blood being again in evidence--and so
might have been the mother's fine imagination. It was Defoe and Mungo
Park and Cooke who enchained the boy's attention, as well as many of the
chronicles of the later navigators. But of the current literature of
the day--Longfellow, Margaret Fuller, Hawthorne, and Emerson--no one
appealed to him as did the man Poe. He and St. George had passed many
an hour discussing him. Somehow the bond of sympathy between himself and
the poet had become the stronger. Both had wept bitter tears over the
calamities that had followed an unrequited love.

It was during one of these talks--and the poet was often under
discussion--that St. George had suddenly risen from his chair, lighted
a candle, and had betaken himself to the basement--a place he seldom
visited--from which he brought back a thin, crudely bound, and badly
printed, dust-covered volume bearing the title "Tamerlane:--by a
Bostonian." This, with a smile he handed to Harry. Some friend had given
him the little book when it was first published and he had forgotten
it was in the house until he noted Harry's interest in the author. Then
again, he wanted to see whether it was the boy's literary taste, never
much in evidence, or his romantic conception of the much-talked-of poet,
which had prompted his intense interest in the man.

"Read these poems, Harry, and tell me who wrote them," said St. George,
dusting the book with a thrash of his handkerchief and tossing it to the
young fellow.

The boy caught it, skimmed through the thin volume, linger