pe Terrace and the mills would probably go for the
mortgages. There was a small life-insurance settled upon Mrs. Lawrence,
and the children would be fortuneless.

By spring the estate was in a fair way of settlement. Fred had vibrated
between the city and Yerbury all winter, but his mother had been taken
to Mrs. Minor's. A gardener and his wife were placed in charge of the
house, while efforts were being made to rent it. A few rooms had not
been disturbed.

And now Frederic De Woolfe Lawrence looked about him to see what could
be done. Up to this time he had never given himself an anxious thought
about money or his future. Now it stared him unpleasantly in the face.
What could _he_ do?

Many things, he said at first, with the buoyant certainty of youth and
inexperience. Here was his education, his talents, his fine mental
training. Surely he had the magical open-sesame of some door.

So he set to work industriously, and wrote several articles on the
history and the philosophy of the pure sciences. Very fine-drawn indeed,
very intellectual and analytical, as he went through the different
schools of thought, being able, it seemed to him, to argue as well for
the one side as for the other. Then he tried Neo-Platonism with its
profoundly mystical aspects and its brilliant array of philosophers, its
fascinating aspects of Pantheism. The new world and to-day had nothing
for him; the dead and gone past, every thing.

Alas! From every side he heard the cry, Literature had been overdone. No
one would buy, no one would read, in this great turmoil. Everybody wrote
now, schoolgirls, college-fledglings: even small farmers and mechanics,
with the training of the present and a smattering of knowledge, set up
for geniuses.

One advised him to try the realistic school: the old-time philosophies
had lost the high place they once held, and to gain the attention of
to-day writers must have snap and vim. Another recommended popular
science made easy and attractive to general readers, something that
caught at the first glance. Life was too short to be devoting years to
any one branch of study. Still another was fain to persuade him to
attack the pernicious systems and monstrous abuses of the present day.
Then he stumbled over Crosby, one of his college-chums and a member of
the L---- Club, where he had been a frequent and welcome visitor the
winter before.

"My dear fellow," said he, with patronizing good-nature, "take my
advice, an