HOW THE AUTHOR OF 'THE RAVEN' MET HS DEATH.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 362, 24 April 1889, Page 4

HOW THE AUTHOR OF ' THE RAVEN ' MET HS DEATH.

The latest statement as to the circumstances under which E. A. Poe met his death is given by Mr E. H. Didier in the ' New York Sun,' on the authority of an intimate acquaintance of the poet. Poe's habitual resort at Baltimore was an ' oyster stand and liquor bar,' kept by Widow Meagher. ' Poe had been shifting for many years between Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New ii r ork,' observes Mr Didier' < informant. 'He had been away from Baltimore for three or four months, whon he turned up one evening at the Widow Meagher's. I was there when he came in. He privately told me he had been to Richmond and was on his way north to get ready for his wedding. It was drink all around, and repeat until the crowd was pretty full. It was the night before the election, and four of us, including Poe, started up. We had not gone half a dozen squares when we were nabbed by a gang of men who were on the look out for voters to " coop." It was the practice in those days to seize people, whether drunk or sober, lock them up until the polls were opened, and then march them round to every precinct where they were made to vote the ticket of the party that controlled the " coop." Our coop was in the rear of an engine-house on Calvert-street. It was part of the game to stupefy the prisoners with drugged liquor. Well, the next day we were voted at thirty-one different places, and over and over, it being as much as a man's life was worth to rebel. Poe was so badly drugged that, after he was carried on two or three different rounds, the gang said it was no use to vote a dend man any longer. So they shoved him into a cab and sent him to a hospital to get him out of the way. The commonly-accepted story that Poe died from the effects of dissipation is all bosh. It was nothing of the kind. He died from laudanum or some other poison that was forced upon him in the coop. He was in a dying condition when he was being voted around the city. The story told by Griswold of Poe's having been on a week's spree and being picked up on the street is talse. I saw him ehoved into the cab myself, and he told me he had just arrived in the city.'