They had a little cottage at Fordham, in the country just out of New York. It was a very humble place, but the scenery about it was beautiful. Poe himself became ill, and his dear Virginia was dying of consumption. They were so poor that friends had to help them. One of these friends wrote: "There was no clothing on the bed, which was only straw, but a snow-white counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on the bed wrapped in her husband's great-coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom." On one Saturday in January, 1847, Virginia died. Her husband, wrapped in the military cloak that had once covered her, followed the body to the tomb in the family vault of the Valentines, relatives of the family. CHAPTER X POE AS A STORY-WRITER Next to "The Raven," Poe's most famous work is that fascinating story, "The Gold-Bug," perhaps the best detective story that was ever written, for it is based on logical principles which are instructive as well as interesting. Poe's powerful mind was always analyzing and inventing. It is these inventions and discoveries of his which make him famous. The story of the gold-bug is that of a man who finds a piece of parchment on which is a secret writing telling where Captain Kidd hid his treasure off the coast of South Carolina. The gold-beetle has nothing whatever to do with the real story, and is only introduced to mystify. It is one of the principles of all conjuring tricks to have something to divert the attention. Poe's detective story is a sort of conjuring trick, but it is all the more interesting because he fully explains it. Cryptographs are systems of secret writing. The letter _e_ is represented by some strange character, perhaps the figure 8. In "The Gold-Bug" _t_ is a semicolon and _h_ is 4, so that; 48 means _the_. Sometimes the letter _e_ is represented by several signs, any one of which the writer may use; and perhaps the word _the_, which occurs so often, is represented by a single character, like _x_. Often, too, the words are run together, so that at first sight you cannot tell where one word begins and another ends. Solving a cryptograph is like doing a mathematical problem, and Poe was very clever at it. He published a series of articles on "Cryptography" or systems of secret writing, in _Alexander's Weekly Messenger_, and challenged any reader to send in a cipher which he could not translate into ordinary language. Hundreds were sent to him, and he solved them all, though it took up a great deal of his time.