But Mrs. L——­, anxious to find some way out of her difficulty since her husband was lying cold, and knowing of no one else to whom to turn, had written to him.  There was no food in the house, no medicine, no way to feed the children at the moment.  That matter of $1100 now—­could he spare a little?  L——­ had thought—­

A letter in answer was not long in arriving, and a most moving M——­y document it was.  M——­ had been stunned by the dreadful news, stunned.  Could it really be?  Could it?  His young brilliant friend?  Impossible!  At the dread, pathetic news he had cried—­yes he had—­cried—­and cried—­and cried—­and then he had even cried some more.  Life was so sad, so grim.  As for him, his own affairs were never in so wretched a condition.  It was unfortunate.  Debts there were on every hand.  They haunted him, robbed him of his sleep.  He himself scarcely knew which way to turn.  They stood in serried ranks, his debts.  A slight push on the part of any one, and he would be crushed—­crushed—­go down in ruin.  And so, as much as he was torn, and as much as he cried, even now, he could do nothing, nothing, nothing.  He was agonized, beaten to earth, but still—.  Then, having signed it, there was a P.S. or an N.B.  This stated that in looking over his affairs he had just discovered that by stinting himself in another direction he could manage to scrape together twenty-five dollars, and this he was enclosing.  Would that God had designed that he should be better placed at this sad hour!

* * * * *

However that may be, I at once sent for the mss. and they came, a jumbled mass in two suitcases and a portfolio; and a third suitcase, so I was informed, containing all of a hundred mss., mostly stories, had been lost somewhere!  There had been much financial trouble of late and more than one enforced move.  Mrs. L——­ had been compelled—­but I will not tell all.  Suffice it to say that he had such an end as his own realistic pen might have satirically craved.

The mss., finally sorted, tabulated and read, yielded two small volumes of excellent tales, all unpublished, the published material being all but uniformly worthless.  There was also the attempt at a popular comedy, previously mentioned, a sad affair, and a volume of essays, as well as a very, very slender but charming volume of verse, in case a publisher could ever be found for them—­a most agreeable little group, showing a pleasing sense of form and color and emotion.  I arranged them as best I could and finally—­

But they are still unpublished.

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