There is no doubt that Aladdin’s recovery dated from Margaret’s visit. The poor boy was too sick to say what he had planned, but Margaret sat by his bed for a while and held his hand, and said little abrupt conventional things that meant much more to them both, and that was enough. Besides, and under the guns of her father’s eyes, just before she went away she stooped and kissed him on the forehead, and that was more than enough to make anybody get over anything, Aladdin thought. So he slept a long cool sleep after Margaret had gone, and woke free of fever. As he lay gathering strength to sit up in bed, which treat had been promised him in ten days, Aladdin’s mind worked hard over the future, and what he could machinate in order one day to be almost worthy to kiss the dust under Margaret’s feet. She sent him flowers twice, but was not allowed to come and see him again. Aladdin had awful struggles with the boredom of convalescence. He felt perfectly well, and they wouldn’t let him get up and out; everything forbidden he wanted to eat. And his one solace was the Brackett library. This was an extraordinary collection of books. They were seven, and how they got there nobody knows. The most important in the collection was, in Mrs. Brackett’s estimation, an odd volume of an encyclopedia, bound in tree-calf and labeled, “Safety-lamps to Stranglers.” Next were four fat tomes in the German language on scientific subjects; these, provided that anybody had ever wanted to read them, had never succeeded in getting themselves read, but they had cuts and cuts which were fascinating to surmise about. The sixth book was the second volume of a romance called “The Headsman,” by “the author of ‘The Spy,’” and the seventh was a back-split edition of Poe’s poems. The second volume of “The Headsman” went like cakes and syrup on a cold morning, for it was narrative, and then it was laid aside, because it was dull. The four German books had their cuts almost examined out of them, and the encyclopedia book, from “Safety-lamps to Stranglers,” practically had its contents torn out and devoured. In after life Aladdin could always speak with extraordinary fluency, feeling, and understanding on anything that began with S, such as Simeon Stylites and Senegambia. But the poems of Poe were what made his sickness worth while and put the call upon all his after life. We learn of the critics and professors of English that there are greater lyric poets than Poe. They will base this on technicalities and theories of what poetry has been and what poetry ought to be, and will not take into account the fact that of all of them--Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth when he is a poet at all, Heine, and the lyric body of Goethe and the rest--not one in proportion to the mass of his production so often leaves the ground and spreads wings as Poe,--