"Then you knew something of the poet, Doctor?"
"I was his intimate associate for years. Much that biographers have said of him is false, especially regarding his death. Poe was not an habitual drunkard, but he was a steady drinker when his means admitted of it. His habitual resort when in Baltimore was the Widow Meagher's place, on the city front, inexpensive, but respectable, having an oyster and liquor stand, and corresponding in some respects with the coffee shops of San Francisco. Here I frequently met him."
"But about his death?"
"The mystery of the poet's death had remained a mystery for more than forty years when there appeared in a Texas paper an article from the pen of the editor, in which he gave a letter from a Dr. Snodgrass professing to reveal the truth of the matter.
"About the time that this article was published there appeared one in the San Francisco Chronicle by a reporter of that paper, telling of an interview which he had with this same Dr. Snodgrass, of whom he says: 'He was a well-known literary Bohemian of this city who long ago gave up his profession and is spending his old age in a state of dreamy existence from which he is seldom aroused except to correct some error concerning people and things of past times, of which he possesses a mine of reminiscences.'"
The Doctor, denying that Poe had died from dissipation, gave an account of the manner of his death as he knew it, corresponding in all particulars with that given by him to the Texas editor. In conclusion, he said:
"Poe did not die of dissipation. I say that he was deliberately murdered. He died of laudanum or some other drug forced upon him by his kidnappers. When one said, 'What is the use of carrying around a dying man?' they put him in a cab and sent him to the hospital. I was there and saw it myself."
"Poe had been shifting about between Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York for some years. Once he had been away for several months in Richmond, and one evening turned up at the widow's. I was there when he came in. Then it was drinks all round, and at length we were real jolly. It was the eve of an election, and we started up town. There were four of us, and we had not gone half a dozen squares when we were nabbed by policemen, who were looking up voters to "coop." It was the practice in those days to seize people, whether drunk or sober, and keep them locked up until the polls were opened and then march them to every precinct in control of the party having the coop. This coop was in the rear of an engine-house on Calvert street. It was part of the plan to stupefy the prisoners with drugged liquor. Next day we were voted at thirty different places, it being as much as one's life was worth to rebel. Poe was so badly drugged that he had to be carried on two or three rounds, and then the gang said it was no use trying any longer to vote a dead man and must get rid of him. And with that they shoved him into a cab and sent him away."
"Then he died from dissipation, after all?"
"Nothing of the kind. He died from the effects of laudanum or some other poison forced on him in the coop. He was in a dying condition when being voted twenty or thirty times. The story told by Griswold and others of his being picked up in the street is a lie. I saw him thrust into the cab myself."