During the year and a half of Edgar Poe's connection with _Graham's Magazine_ he had raised the number of subscribers from five thousand to thirty-seven thousand. His salary, like that he had received from _The Messenger_, had been a mere pittance for such service as he gave, but also, like what he received from _The Messenger_ it had been a regular income--a dependence. With the addition of the little checks paid him for brilliant work in other periodicals, it had amply served, as has been said, to keep the Wolf from the door. In order to make as much without a regular salary it would be necessary for him to sell a great many articles and that they should be promptly paid for. And so he wrote, and wrote, and wrote, while "Muddie" took the little rolls of manuscript around and around seeking a market for them. Her stately figure and saintlike face became familiar at the doors of all the editors and publishers in Philadelphia. It was a weary business but her strength and courage seemed never to flag. Sometimes she succeeded in selling a story or a poem promptly and receiving prompt pay. Then there was joy in the rose-embowered cottage. Sometimes after placing an article payment was put off time and time again until hope deferred made sick the hearts of all three dwellers in the cottage. Oftentimes they were miserably poor--sometimes they were upon the verge of despair--yet through all there was an undercurrent of happiness that nothing could destroy--they had each other and even at the worst they still dreamed the dream of the Valley of the Many-Colored Grass, even though the heartsease blossom drooped and drooped. Virginia's attacks continued to come at intervals, and each time the shadow hung more persistently and with deeper gloom over the cottage. It would be lifted at length, but not until the husband and mother had suffered again all the agonies of parting--not until what they believed to be the last goodbyes had been said and the imagination, running ahead of the actual, had gone through each separate detail of death and burial. The Dreamer's thoughts dwelt constantly upon these scenes and details until finally the "dirges of his hope one melancholy burden bore--of Never--Nevermore." Under the influence of the state of mind that was thus induced, a new poem began to take shape in his brain--a poem of the death of a young and beautiful woman and the despair and grief of the lover left to mourn her in loneliness. As it wrote itself in his mind the word that had thrilled and charmed and frightened him at the bedside of his mother and to whose time his feet had so often marched, as to a measure--the mournful, mellifluous word, Nevermore--became its refrain.