The Death of Edgar A. Poa.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume X, Issue 3194, 2 May 1889, Page 2

The Death of Edgar A. Poa.

. ,Tke latest statement as to the circumstances under which E; A. Poe met. his death is given by Mr E. L Didler in the New York Sim, on the authority of an intimate rcquaintance of the poet. Poe's habitual resort at Baltimore was ah " oyßter stand and liquor bar,' 1 kept by Widow Meagher'. " Poo had' been shifting-. for many years between Baltimore, -Philadelphia and New York," observes Mr Didler's informant. "Ho had been away from Baltimore for three or four months, when he turned up one evening at the Widow Meagher's. I was there when he came in. He privately told mo that he had been to. Eichmond, and was on his way north to get ready for his wedding, It was drink all round and repeat, until the crowd was pretty full. It wat the night of the election, and four of us, including Poe, started up. We had not gone half-a-dozen., squares whon we wore nabbed by a gang of. men who were on the look-out for voters te 'coop.' It was the practice in those days to seize people, whether drunk or sober, Jock them up until the polls were opened, and carry them around toevery precinct, where they were made to vote the ticket of the party that con: trolled the 'coop.' Our coop was in the rear of an engine-house oh flal-vert-stveet. It was part of the game to stupify 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 iCwt'a no use to vote a dead man auy longer. So they shoved him into a cab and sent him ,to an hospital to get him out of the way. The commonly accepted story that Poe died from the effects of dissipation is all bosi It was nothing of the. kind, He died from laudanum, or some other poison that was forced upon him in the coop. Ho was in a. dying condition when he was being voted around the city, Tho'story told by Gnswold of Poe having been on a week's spree and being picked up on the street is false. I saw him shoved in the cab myself, and he told me he had just arrived-in the city,