Eddie was a sweet boy who loved me and my young daughter Virginia.  He tried to help but except selling a young slave I’d inherited he couldn’t make any money for us despite writing hours a day.   Our best prospect was John Allan, and sometimes I wrote him Eddie deserved to do well and would if he could overcome debts.  He eventually responded with eighty dollars, early in 1832, but didn’t reply the following year when Eddie, who’d left us and roamed for months and gotten awfully worn out before returning, wrote asking to be pitied and saved from destruction.

John Allan remained hard and silent in October 1833 when Eddie won a national contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, which awarded him fifty dollars for his story “Manuscript Found in a Bottle” and praised “the singular force and beauty” of the work.  In 1834 Allan further insulted Eddie by dying and failing to mention in his will the foster son who’d so long loved him.  I can’t understand a wealthy man ruining us that way.