Bathtub Gin and Xeroxing

The alms man apprehended a book-thief dashing out the front door of the library. He tripped him up with his walking-stick, sending him through the side door and into the mezzanine, the purloined tome catapulting out the front door and landing square in his lap. He picked it up, adjusting the weight of the book with his wrists, and looked at the title, Egger Allen Po, The Purloined Letter and Other Stories. Someone had scribbled over the ‘d’ and ‘a’ and completely removed the ‘e’ at the end of Poe. Scrawled on the book jacket was,

And this was the reason that, long ago,

In this kingdom by the sea,

A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

My beautiful Annabel Lee;

So that her highborn kinsman came

And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulchre

In this kingdom by the sea.

He recalled reading this poem in middle-school, but had forgotten the beginning and the end. ‘Cooping’ he mumbled to himself ‘the poor bastard died from a nasty rash of cooping’. He slid the book under his cardboard padding and went back to almsing. By this time the book-thief had been wrestled to the ground a second time and was blathering on about bathtub gin and Xeroxing.