This one first appeared in The Enchanter Completed, the tribute anthology to L. Sprague de Camp that I had the privilege of editing. Being a tavern tale, it's a sort of hommage to de Camp and Pratt's classic Tales from Gavagan's Bar. That's why the bartender here is called "George M." You're supposed to think "Cohan," the name of de Camp and Pratt's barkeep. As for the rest, well, I had the chance to be a Poe-t, and I took it.

Here’s two dollars and fifty cents-in gold, by God, George M. A quarter eagle’s plenty to buy drinks for everybody in the place. Tell me when you need more. I’ll do it again.

What’s that you say, my friend? You see more gold now than you did just a few years ago? Well, I should hope you do, by thunder. It’s all coming from California, way out West. I don’t suppose any one would have thought the world held so much gold until they stumbled across it on that Sutter fellow’s land.

But I don’t feel like talking about gold right this here minute-except that that’s my gold on the bar. If I’m buying, part of what I’m buying is the chance to talk about any blamed thing I please. Anybody feel like quarreling about that?

No? Good.

All right, then. Here goes. Friends, my name is William Legrand. Most of you know me, and most of you call me Bill. I’m a plainspoken man, I am. Nothing fancy about me. Yes, I’m partial to canvasback duck and soft-shell crabs when I can get ‘em, but what Baltimorean isn’t? That’s not fancy-they’re right good eating, and who’ll tell me they aren’t?

I was born in the year of our Lord 1800. Last year of the eighteenth century, that was, and don’t you believe any silly fool who tries to tell you it was the first year of the nineteenth. As of the twenty-seventh ultimo, that makes me a right round fifty-one years of age. I am not ashamed to say I have done pretty well for myself in that half century and a little bit.