Finally, he drew his unfinished note before him again and added to what he had written,

“If you will be my friend so far as to loan me twenty dollars, I will be with you tomorrow—­otherwise it will be impossible, and I must submit to my fate.  Sincerely yours,

    “E.A.  POE.”

CHAPTER XX.

The dinner went off charmingly.  In addition to several journalists, Mr. Latrobe and Mr. Miller who, with Mr. Kennedy, had formed the committee that awarded the prize to Edgar Poe, were there and the meeting between the young guest of honor and his patrons engendered a spirit of bon-homie that was palpable to all.  Under its spell The Dreamer’s spirits rose.  Yet he was quiet, listening with deep attention to the conversation of his elders, but having little to say, until the repast was half over, when he responded to the evident desire of his host to draw him out.  The conversation had turned upon a favorite theme of his—­the power of words.  He threw himself into it with zest, and with brilliant play of expression animating his splendid eyes and pale features, and the graceful, unrestrained gestures of one thoroughly at ease and entirely unconscious of self, he held the table spell-bound with a flow of sparkling talk in which his own exquisite choice of words delighted his hearers no less than the originality and beauty of his thought.

In the young editor of The Saturday Visitor he promptly found a second friend among men of letters.  Mr. Wilmer, already prejudiced in his favor by the success of the “MS. Found in a Bottle,” and its cordial reception by the public, and by Mr. Kennedy’s warm words of recommendation, yielded at once to the witchery of the poetic eyes, the courtly manners and the charmed tongue, and not only befriended him by inviting and accepting his writings for publication, but gave him, as time went on, what proved to be a stimulant to good work as well as one of his greatest pleasures—­the intimate companionship of a man of congenial tastes and near his own age.

* * * * *

The winter that followed was one of the happiest of The Dreamer’s life—­a lull in a tempest, a dream of peace within a dream of storm and stress.

He was soon able to return the twenty dollars to Mr. Kennedy.  The newspapers kept him busy and while the returns were—­so far—­small, he was hopeful.  He felt that he had made a beginning, and that the future promised well.  His work was praised and he became something of a lion—­the doors of many a proud Baltimore home opening graciously to his touch.

He cared little for general society, however.  His greatest pleasure he found in his evenings with the Kennedys (for Mrs. Kennedy had taken him in as promptly as her husband) or in a canter far into the country on the saddle horse which Mr. Kennedy, noting his pallor and thinking that out-door exercise would be of benefit to him, kindly placed at his disposal, or in walks in the fields and lanes beyond the city with his new chum Wilmer.  Many a fine afternoon saw these two cronies, often accompanied by the sprite, Virginia, with her airy movements and vivid beauty, rambling in the suburbs, and beyond, with heads close in intimate communion of thought and fancy.