The little Virginia claimed him as her own from the beginning.  As long as he was weak enough to need to be waited upon her small feet and hands never wearied in his service but as he grew better, it was he who served her.  There never were such stories as he could tell, such games as he could play, and he took her cat to his heart with gratifying promptness.  When they walked out together the world seemed turned into a fairyland as with her hand held fast in his he told her wonderful secrets about the clouds, the trees, the flowers, the birds and even about the stones under her feet.  It was fascinating to her too, to lie and listen to him read and talk with “Muddie.”  She was not wise enough to understand much that they said, but at night, when she had been tucked into bed, he would sit under the lamp and read aloud from one of the books in the shelves, or from the long strips of paper upon which he wrote and wrote; and though she did not understand the words, she delighted to listen, for his voice made the sweetest lullaby music.

With the return of health and strength, energy and the impulse for life’s battle began to return to Edgar Poe, and with them a new incentive.  He began to awaken to the fact that “Muddie” and “Sissy” were poor and that his presence in their home was making them poorer—­that the struggle to support this modest establishment was a severe one, and that he must arise and add what he could to the earnings of the deft needle.  The three little editions of his poems had brought him no money—­he had begun to despair of their ever bringing him any.  He had sometime since turned his attention to prose but the manuscripts of such stories as he had offered the publishers had come back to him with unflattering promptness.  He began now, however, with fresh heart to write and to arrange a number of those that seemed to him to be his best, for a book, to which he proposed to give the title, “Tales of the Folio Club.”

But the new tide of hope was soon at a low ebb.  The editors and publishers would have none of his work.

When the repeated return to him of the stories, poems and essays he sent out had begun to make him lose faith in their merit and to question his own right to live since the world had no use for the only commodity he was capable of producing, “Muddie” came in one evening with an unusually bright, eager look in her eyes and a copy of The Saturday Visitor (a weekly paper published in Baltimore) in her hand.

“Here’s your chance, Eddie,” she said.

In big capitals upon the first page of the paper was an announcement to the effect that the Visitor would give two prizes—­one of one hundred dollars for the best short story, and one of fifty dollars for the best poem submitted to it anonymously.  Three well-known gentlemen of the city would act as judges, and the names of the successful contestants would be published upon the twelfth of October.