The works of Edgar Allan Poe; newly collected and edited, with a memoir, critical introductions, and notes, by Edmund Clarence Stedman and George Edward Woodberry; the illustrations by Albert Edward Sterner.

TALES OF NATURAL BEAUTY
These latter did not extend to the floor, but were much
longer and narrower than usual; they had single shutters like doors; the panes were of lozenge form, but
quite large. The door itself had its upper half of
glass, also in lozenge panes; a movable shutter secured it at night. The door to the west wing was in
its gable, and quite simple; a single window looked
out to the south. There was no external door to the
north wing, and it, also, had only one window to the
east.
The blank wall of the eastern gable was relieved by
stairs (with a balustrade) running diagonally across it,
the ascent being from the south. Under cover of the
widely projecting eave these steps gave access to a
door leading into the garret, or rather loft, for it was
lighted only by a single window to the north, and
seemed to have been intended as a store-room.
The piazzas of the main building and western wing
had no floors, as is usual; but at the doors and at
each window, large, flat, irregular slabs of granite lay
imbedded in the delicious turf, affording comfortable
footing in all weather. Excellent paths of the same
material, not nicely adapted, but with the velvety sod
filling frequent intervals between the stones, led hither
and thither from the house, to a crystal spring about
five paces off, to the road, or to one or two out-houses
that lay to the north, beyond the brook, and were
thoroughly concealed by a few locusts and catalpas.
Not more than six steps from the main door of the
cottage stood the dead trunk of a fantastic pear-tree,
so clothed from head to foot in the gorgeous bignonia
blossoms that one required no little scrutiny to determine what manner of sweet thing it could be. From
various arms of this tree hung cages of different kinds.
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