Of the Mackenzies, so closely associated with Poe during his lifetime, I may be allowed to say that a more attractive family group I have rarely known. Beside those I have mentioned were the two youngest members, "Mr. Dick" and Mattie or "Mat"--wayward, generous, warm-hearted Mat, indifferent to people's opinion and heedless of conventionalities. She cared for nothing so much as her horse and dog, and spent an hour each day in the stables, while her aunt, Miss Jane, would exclaim in despair: "I don't know what to do with Martha. I cannot make a lady of her;" to which she would answer with a satisfied assurance that nature had never intended her to be a lady. But about this time--in October--Mat was married. There are ladies living who have heard from their mothers, at that time young girls, accounts of this famous wedding. The festivities were kept up for full two weeks, with ever-changing house parties, and each evening music and dancing, with unbounded hospitality. Miss Jane Mackenzie, upon whom the family chiefly depended, and whose fortune they expected to inherit, was gone on a visit to her brother in London; but she had given Mat a liberal sum wherewith to celebrate her wedding. Sadly my thoughts pass from this gay time over the next ten years or so to the time of "the war" and the changes which it brought to this family and to us all. CHAPTER XXVI. MRS. WHITMAN. Poe was still in Richmond, presumably courting the widow Shelton, though in so quiet a manner that it attracted little or no attention, when he unexpectedly received from Mrs. Whitman, who seems to have repented of her silence, a letter or poem of so encouraging a nature that he immediately left Richmond and proceeded to New York. Here he obtained a letter of introduction to Mrs. Whitman, which he on the following day presented to that lady at her home in Providence. The next evening he spent in her company, and on the succeeding day asked her to marry him! Receiving no definite answer, he, on his return to New York, sent her a letter in which, alluding to his previous intention of addressing Mrs. Shelton, he says: "Your letter reached me on the very day on which I was about to enter upon a course which would have borne me far away from you, sweet, sweet Helen, and the divine dream of your love." A few weeks later, when he had obtained from her a conditional promise of marriage, he again wrote--a letter in which he clearly alludes to his still cherished design of establishing the _Stylus_, from which he anticipates such brilliant results. Thus he artfully and apparently for the first time seeks to interest her in the scheme.