Then she went out into the streets sweltering in the summer heat, and turned her face toward that obscure quarter of the town where human beings who could not afford to rest or to dine might at least secure a corner in which to “lodge” and the right, if not the appetite, to “eat,” for an infinitesimal sum; for it was in this quarter that strange as it might, seem, her instinct told her her search must be made—­in this quarter that Edgar Poe, the rich merchant’s pampered foster-child, Edgar Poe, the poet, the scholar, the exquisite in dress, in taste and in manners, would be found.

When she did find him the mystery that had surrounded him was stripped of the last shred of its romance.  In a room compared to which the little chamber back of the shop of Mrs. Fipps, the milliner, in which his mother had drawn her last breath, and in which Frances Allan had found and fallen in love with him, was luxurious, he lay upon a bed of straw thrown into a dark corner, tossing with fever and in his delirium, literally “babbling of green fields.”

The kind-hearted, but ignorant and uncleanly slattern who sought with “lodgings to let” to keep the souls of herself and family in their bodies, gave him as much attention as the demands of a numerous brood of little slatterns and a drunken husband would permit, and sighed with real sorrow as she admitted that the “poor gentleman” was in a very bad way.  It was her opinion he had seen better days she confided to the three other lodgers who were just then renting the three straw beds in the three other corners of the same dark, squalid and evil-smelling room.  He was “so soft-spoken and elegant-like, if he was poor as a church mouse.  Pity he had no folks nor nobody to keer nothin’ about ’im.”

It was not at once that Mrs. Clemm found him.  She had sought him diligently in what would to-day be known as the slum districts of the city, descending the scale of respectability lower and lower until she thought she had reached the bottom, but without success.

Then, upon the fourth or fifth day of her search, late in the afternoon, when the little Virginia was watching anxiously from the sitting-room window for “Muddie’s” return, a wagon stopped before her door and out of it and into the house was borne a stretcher upon which lay an apparently dying man—­ghastly, unshaven, and muttering broken unintelligible sentences.

Keeping pace with the wagon as it crept along the street, might have been seen the stately, sad-eyed Widow Clemm.  When the wagon stopped, she stopped, and directed the careful lifting of the stretcher from it.  Then she turned and opened the door of her small house and led the way to her neat bed-chamber where, upon her own immaculate bed, the sick man was gently laid—­henceforth, as long as need be, a cot in the sitting-room would be good enough for her.

The little Virginia, her soft eyes filled with wonder, had followed her mother upon tip-toe.