had been taught
by an old Scotch dame who kept an "infant-school," and who then and for
years afterward called him "her ain wee laddie," and to whom as long as
she lived he was accustomed to carry offerings of choice smoking
tobacco. He also learned from her to speak in the broad Scottish
dialect, which greatly amused and pleased Mr. Allan. The boy was at even
this age remarkably quick in learning anything.

Mr. Valentine also delighted in getting up wrestling matches between
Edgar and the little pickaninnies with whom he played, rewarding the
victor with gifts of money. But there was one thing which no money or
other reward could induce the boy to undertake, and this was to go near
the country churchyard after sunset, even in company with these same
little darkies. Once, in riding home late, Edgar being seated behind Mr.
Valentine, they passed a deserted log-cabin, near which were several
graves, when the boy's nervous terror became so great that he attempted
to get in front of his companion, who took him on the saddle before
him. "They would run after us and pull me off," he said, betraying at
even this early age the weird imagination of his maturer years.

This incident led to his being questioned, when it was discovered that
he had been accustomed to go with his colored "mammy" to the servants'
rooms in the evenings, and there listen to the horrible stories of
ghosts and graveyard apparitions such as this ignorant and superstitious
race delight in. It is not improbable that the gruesome sketch of the
"_Tempest_" family, one of his earliest published, whose ghosts are
represented as seated in coffins around a table in an undertaker's shop,
and thence flying back to their near-by graves, was not inspired by some
such story heard in Mr. Allan's kitchen.

Undoubtedly, these ghostly narratives, heard at this early and
impressionable age, served in part to produce those weird and ghoulish
imaginings which characterize some of Poe's writings, and to create that
tinge of superstition which was well known to his friends. He always
avoided cemeteries, hated the sight of coffins and skeletons, and would
never walk alone at night even on the street; believing that evil
spirits haunted the darkness and walked beside the lonely wayfarer,
watching to do him a mischief. Death he loathed and feared, and a corpse
he would not look upon. And yet, as bound by a weird fascination, he
wrote continually of death.

Edgar Poe, like ever