He would get away as early the next morning as possible, he told himself.  He would waste no time in goodbyes, for, he remembered with some bitterness, there were few to say goodbye to.  The boys were all off at college again, now that the holidays were over, and as for Myra, she had quickly consoled herself and was already a wife!  He had addressed some reproachful verses to her as a bride; then dismissed her from his thoughts.

He arose and placed the picture carefully in the trunk with the rest of his treasures and then went to bed to fall into the easy slumber of one whose mind is well made up.

* * * * *

A few days later Edgar Poe had looked with delight and ineffable emotion upon the real Boston Harbor, with its rocky little islets and its varied shipping and its busy wharves, and—­for him—­its suggestions of one in Heaven.

CHAPTER XIII.

Upon his arrival in Boston, our errant knight, before setting out upon his quest for the Fame and Fortune to whose service he was sworn, spent some hours in wandering about the old town, with mind open to the quickening influences of historic association and eye to the irregular, picturesque beauty about him.

It was one of those rare days that come sometimes in the month of February when, though according to the callendar it should be cold, there is a warmth in the sunshine that seems borrowed from Spring.  Tired out by his tramp, young Edgar at length sat down upon a bench in the Common, under an elm, great of girth and wide-spreading.  The sunshine fell pleasantly upon him, through the bare branches.  Roundabout were other splendid, but now bare elms and he sat gazing upward into their sturdy brown branches and dreamily picturing to himself the beauty of these goodly trees clothed in the green vesture of summer.  Suddenly, by a whimsical sequence of suggestion, the pleasure he felt in the sunshine of February as it reached him under the tree in Boston Common, vividly called to mind the refreshing coolness of the shade of the elms, in full leaf, as he, a little lad of six, had walked the streets of old Stoke-Newington for the first time.

There was little relation between that first and this present parting with the Allans, yet in his mind they became inseparably connected.  He recalled his happiness in his first essays at composition, made at the Manor School, and told himself that, though he did not know it at the time, that was the first step toward his life work.  He was now, here in Boston, the city of his birth, about to take the second; for the hour had arrived when his work would be given to the world!

Across his knees he held the box containing his precious manuscripts.  He arose from the bench and turning toward the lower end of the Common, walked, with brisk, hopeful step down town, in the direction of a well-known publishing house whose location he had already ascertained.