breathless night in July found him at the familiar tryst at an earlier
hour than was his wont. He lay upon the grass at her feet with his hands
clasped under his head and his face turned up to the stars. There was
moonlight as well as starlight, and in its silvery radiance his
features, always pale, had the frigid whiteness of marble. The wide-open
eyes that stared upward to the stars, were larger, darker than in
daylight, and more full of brooding; the white brow, with its crown of
dark ringlets was whiter and more expansive.

In a dormer-windowed cottage overlooking a rose garden, on Clay Street,
an erect gentleman in an uncompromising stock and immaculate ruffles,
with narrow blue eyes under a beetling brow, and a somewhat hawk-like
nose, sharply questioned a fair and graceful lady, with an anxious
expression on her flower-face, as to why "that boy" did not come home to
his supper. But they were used by now, to the boy's strange, wayward
whims, and so did not marvel much. Only--they had not seen him since the
feat that had set the town ringing with his name and it seemed to them
that it would have been natural for him to come home in the flush of his
triumph and tell them about it.

Edgar Poe had that day created the sensation of the hour by swimming
from the Richmond wharves to Warwick--a distance of six miles--in the
midsummer sun.

Richmond was a fair and pleasant little city in those days, in spite of
the fact that our boy-poet found in it so much to make him melancholy.
"The merriest place in America," Thackeray called it some years later,
and would probably have said the same of it then had he been there. The
blight of Civil War had not touched the cheerful temper of its people;
the tenement row had not crowded out grass and flowers. It was more a
large village than a town, with gracious homes--not elbowing each other
for foundation room, but standing comfortably apart, amid their green
lawns, and with wide verandahs overhanging their many-flowered gardens.

"After tea," on warm nights, the houses overflowed into these
verandahs, and there was much visiting from one to another--much
light-hearted talk and happy laughter; the popular theme being whatever
happened to be "the news."

It was the day of contentment, for wants were moderate and plentifully
supplied; the day of satisfaction in wholesome domestic joys; the day of
hospitality without grudging; the day when sweetness extracted from
little pleasures