weather that summer--the summer before she died--we could
sometimes see her sitting at her front door, wrapped up, with her
husband or mother beside her, Mr. Poe reading a paper and Mrs. Clemm
knitting. Most times there would be one or two children along, and Mr.
Poe would play ball with them while his wife laughingly looked on. She
looked like a child herself, hardly taller than they were. Well--no; she
wasn't exactly pretty. She looked _too spooky_, with her white face and
big, black eyes; but she was interesting looking, and we felt sorry for
her--and for them all, for that matter. You could see they had known
better days."

As the summer wore on, and the first autumn breezes shook the leaves
from the cherry tree, a change came over Virginia. Mrs. Clemm wrote to
Miss Poe that unless she could go to her relations at the South--a thing
not to be thought of--she would not live through the winter. Eddie's
health was completely broken, and unless she herself remained strong
enough to take care of them both, all would have to go to the
poor-house. These letters were generally indirect appeals for pecuniary
aid. Through similar pathetic accounts given by Mrs. Clemm to editors to
whom she offered manuscripts, the condition of the poet and his family
became known and was commented upon by the public papers, to Poe's great
indignation, who took occasion in an anonymous communication to deny its
truth. But that it was no time for pride to stand in the way of dire
necessity is evident from the account of Mrs. Gove on her first visit to
the cottage late in that fall. One can hardly realize a condition of
things such as she described--the bare and fireless room, the bed with
its thin, white covering and the military cloak--a relic of the West
Point days--spread over it, and the sick woman, "whose only means of
warmth was as her husband held her hands and her mother her feet, while
she herself hugged a large tortoise-shell cat to her bosom." And the
thin, haggard man, suffering like his wife from cold and the lack of
nourishing food, but who yet received his visitor with such courtly
elegance of manner, was the author of _The Raven_, with which the world
was even then being thrilled!

It was a blessed day for the distressed family that on which, about the
last of October, Mrs. Shew came to the now bleak little cottage on the
hill and, like a ministering angel, devoted herself to caring for and
comforting them--not only as regarde