It was a strange story that Mrs. Clemm’s cousin Neilson told her, and which had been told him, he said, by an acquaintance of his from Richmond who had known Edgar Poe in his boyhood.

It seems that this Richmond man had during a visit to Baltimore gone to a brickyard to arrange for the shipment home of bricks for a new house he was building.  As he sat in the office talking to the manager of the yard, a line of men bearing freshly molded bricks to the kiln passed the open window.  There was something about the appearance of one of the laborers that struck the Richmond man as familiar and he turned quickly to the manager and asked the name of the man, pointing him out.  The name given him was a strange one to him and he dismissed the matter from his thoughts and returned to his business talk.

Upon his way to his hotel, however, the appearance of the brick-carrier, and the impression that somewhere, he had seen him before, returned to his mind and it came upon him in a flash, first that the likeness was to Edgar Poe, and then the conviction that the man was none other than Poe himself, though emaciated and aged to a degree that, with his shabby dress and unshaven chin, made him scarcely recognizable.  Though he had been but a casual acquaintance of Edgar’s, he was deeply touched at seeing him so evidently in distress, and returned to the brickyard early the next morning for the purpose of speaking to him and of helping him back into the sphere in which he belonged and from which he had so long disappeared.  But the man he sought was not there and no one knew where his lodgings were.  He was a recent employe of the yard, they said, and so gloomy and unsociable that he had made no friends.  He was capable of a great amount of work, which he performed faithfully, but kept to himself and had little to say to anybody.

Upon the day before he had looked ill and had stopped work before the day was over.  He was evidently suffering from exhaustion, but had declared that he needed nothing, and after sitting down to rest upon a pile of bricks for a while, had gone off to his home—­wherever that might be—­as usual, alone.

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This story Neilson Poe set down as highly sensational.  He did not believe, he said with a laugh, that his cousin, when found, would be doing anything half so energetic or useful as carrying bricks—­he would have more hope of him if he could believe it.  The laborer’s real, or fancied, likeness to Edgar was but a case of chance resemblance, that was all.

But that was not enough for Maria Clemm.  She folded her sewing and laid it away with an air of finality which plainly said that she had found other and more pressing work to do.  The sewing must wait a more convenient season.