Some years after the death of Rose Poe, I received a visit from Mrs. Byrd, whom I had not seen since the war, and we talked over times past and present. It had been Rosalie's own choice, she said, to go to Baltimore. She did not like the country or the hard life which they were leading. She must have collected considerable money, but never told where she kept it; nor was it ever found. She told me about her family. Her pretty daughter had married a poor man in preference to a rich one who had offered, and they had two beautiful babies and were very happy. Her brother Richard was infirm and able to do but little work. They had a little place in the country, where they raised their own vegetables, and sent poultry and eggs to market. She and her son-in-law did all the hard work about the place. "I wash and cook for six persons," said she, cheerily. "Yes," she continued, in her old quaint way, "we are poor, but respectable, and I am more content than ever I was at Duncan Lodge. I feel that I have something to live for, and the working life suits me. Yes, we are happy; although there are not two tea-cups in the house of the same pattern." She spoke of Poe, whom she considered to have been always unjustly treated. Everybody could see what his faults were, but few gave him credit for his good qualities--his generous nature and kindly and affectionate disposition, especially as exemplified in the harmony always existing between himself and his wife and mother-in-law. While giving the latter full credit for her devotion to Edgar, her impression was that, except in the matter of his dissipation, her influence over him had not been for good. Her mother and brother, John, believed that the marriage with Virginia had been the greatest misfortune of his life, and that he himself, while patiently resigning himself to his lot, had come to regard it as such. Some ten years after the death of Poe I received from Mrs. Clemm a letter giving a pathetic account of her homelessness and poverty. But, she added, she had been offered a home with her relatives at the South; and she appealed to me, as a friend of her "Eddie," to assist her in raising the money necessary to pay her expenses thither. A similar appeal she made to other of Poe's former friends; but we heard of her afterward as an inmate of the Church Home Infirmary in Baltimore, where she died in 1871, having outlived her son-in-law some twenty-two years. It is a curious coincidence that the building in which she died was the same in which, as the Washington Hospital, Poe had breathed his last. Her grave is in Westminster cemetery, and in sight of Poe's monument. CHAPTER XXXII. POE'S CHARACTER. In order thoroughly to understand Poe, it is necessary that one should recognize the dominant trait of his character--a trait which affected and in a measure overruled all the rest--in a word, _weakness of will_.