Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/22

2 parents' death. I was adopted by Mr. John Allan of Richmond, Virginia, and she by Mr. William McKenzie of the same place." When Mr. Allan died, in 1834, he had given Poe five years of schooling in England, from 1815 to 1820; he had sent him for one session, that of 1826, to the University of Virginia; he had placed him in his counting-house in Richmond; he had obtained his discharge from the army, in which Poe had enlisted at Boston in 1827; he had secured his appointment as a cadet at West Point, where he remained from July, 1830, to March, 1831; and he had continued to send a large enough remittance for his protégé to live on. It is to be hoped also that he had read with proper pride The Ms. Found in a Bottle with which his namesake had astonished the reading public of Baltimore the year before and won the hundred-dollar prize, this being the first public recognition of Poe's narrative skill.

Had Mr. Allan lived a year longer he would have seen Poe back in Richmond on a salary of eight hundred dollars a year as the editor of the great Southern Literary Messenger. Never again was his salary to be so large; but in 1837, Poe and his child-wife, Virginia Clemm, shepherded by Mrs. Clemm,

begin their pilgrimage to New York. From now till the end it was to be only a checkered Grub Street trail for Poe. He did not make his living by his stories or by his poems; he made it, such as it was, by critical hackwork done at odd times for journals and newspapers. He toiled terribly, for the cult of