The youngest

starved, and very much emaciated. was in a stupor, caused by feeding on bread steeped in gin. The old woman acknowledged that she was in the habit of so feeding them, to keep them quiet and make them strong."

This account has only too many touches of verisimilitude in it.

And the author adds: "Mr. Mackenzie, shocked at this spectacle, took the children to his own house, where they were tenderly cared for. A few days wrought a great change in their appearance, and the beauty and intelligence of little Edgar became a subject of universal comment. William Henry, the elder brother, had already been sent to his grandfather [General Poe] in Baltimore."

Two weeks and two days later, after Mrs. Poe had been laid to rest in a now unknown grave in one of the beautiful Richmond cemeteries, the Broad Street Theatre where Mr. Placide's gay little company of Virginia Comedians had so merrily pranced and capered, was consumed in the awful conflagration of Christmas Eve, 1811, in which the governor of Virginia and sixty other persons of high social distinction perished; and from its ashes rose the Monumental Church in memory of the tragic event.

The extinction and fall of The House of Usher could not have been more sudden and terrible :

"Lo! 't is a gala night

Within the lonesome latter years:
A angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,

Sit in a theatre to see

A play of hopes and fears,

While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres."

Can the exquisite yet awful imagery of this poem, full as it is of theatre memories, - mimes, puppets, shifting scenery, funereal curtains, phantom forms, have twined itself somehow about the memory of his mother in connection with the burning of the Richmond Theatre, about which all Virginia never ceased to talk for half a century, and which sent a thrill of horror all over the United States ? Little Edgar must often have heard it discussed, and must have watched the memorial church as it slowly rose out of the grave of the theatre where his mother had charmed the Richmond audiences with her beauty and grace so many times long before.1

It is asserted that only an accident kept the Allans from the theatre that evening.

II.

RICHMOND, Virginia, is one of the most beautiful places in the old Commonwealth renowned for beautiful sites. Founded more than one hundred and fifty years ago, it got its name from the lovely old English village of Richmond above London near which Cardinal Wolsey had built lordly Hampton Court, with Pope's Twickenham near by, Stoke Pogis Church and its immortal Elegy in the distance, and Horace Walpole's villa and the glimmering Thames throwing their clustering associations into the picture.

At Richmond it was (and is) delightful to live, and here, in 1811, having been adopted by Mr. John Allan, an Ayrshire Scotchman from the land of

1 There was even a long-lasting tradition that the Poes had been burned alive in the theatre.

Burns, Edgar Allan Poe took up his abode, a twoyear-old child, precociously clever and beautiful. During his most impressionable years, the city was the most intellectual and with the exception of New Orleans - the gayest city of the South. It was full of old families that had furnished statesmen, legislators, gov. ernors, generals, and Congressmen to the United States; the presidents of the United States frequently resorted there in family reunions and on social visits; distinguished foreigners like Lafayette, after visiting Mount Vernon and Monticello and Montpelier, drifted naturally to the hospitable metropolis of the oldest of the states and were royally entertained with the far-famed Old Virginia profusion.

Little Edgar's childhood and youth were passed in an atmosphere of sociability, open-air sports, oratory, and elocution. Patrick Henry, the great orator of the Revolution, lay in the neighboring churchyard of Old St. John's; Chief-Justice Marshall, the greatest of the justices of the Supreme Court, and John Randoph of Roanoke, celebrated for silver voice and stinging sarcasm, were familiar figures in Richmond streets; retired presidents like Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, after they had laid off the robes of office mingled with democratic simplicity in the cultured throngs that haunted the parlors of Capitol Square and Shockoe Hill, or of the suburban homes where the neighboring plantations projected far into the edges of the city. Almost within hailing distance were the pleasant mansions of the Pages (ancestors of Thomas Nelson Page), Wickhams, Cockes, Harrisons, Mayos, and others socially and politically famed in the fashionable annals of the times, and in the city itself were gathered a goodly company of social celebrities.