nuteness of detail, an eager, loving, childlike recording of little things that nothing seems to escape? The author of The Raven and Ulalume and The Sleeper may have been a dreamer but it was not a dreamer that penned these lines:
"April 7, [1844], just after breakfast.
"MY DEAR MUDDY—We have just this minute done breakfast, and I now sit down to write you about everything. I can't pay for the letter, because the P. O. won't be open to-day. In the first place we arrived safe at Walnut St. wharf. The driver wanted to make me pay a dollar, but I wouldn't. Then I had to pay a boy a levy to put the trunks in the baggage car. In the meantime I took Sis [Virginia] in the Depot Hotel. It was only a quarter past six, and we had to wait till seven. We saw the 'Ledger' and 'Times'—nothing in either—a few words of no account in the 'Chronicle.' We started in good spirits, but did not get here until nearly three o'clock. We went in the cars to Amboy, about forty miles from N. York, and then took the steamboat the rest of the way. Sissy coughed none at all. When we got to the wharf it was raining hard. I left her on board the boat, after putting the trunks in the Ladies' cabin, and set off to buy an umbrella and look for a boarding-house. I met a man selling umbrellas, and bought one for twenty-five cents.
"Then I went up Greenwich St. and soon found a boarding-house. It was just before you get to Cedar St., on the west side going up—left-hand side. It has brown stone steps, with a porch with brown pillars.
