With returning vigor, I renewed my former plans for my future and Estelle’s; but as my steps increased in firmness, my thoughts still reverted to Brathwaite’s wonderful prophetic manuscript, some of the details of which I set about to make realities of the present, rather than of a generation hence. The hope of realizing for myself and Estelle an early return from my mental labors in their development and embodiment, lent new strength, suppleness and deftness to my touch, and seemed to make my insight keener, my inventive powers more fertile, more promptly responsive to the demands upon them. _Festina lente_ became my motto. I doubted as I hoped; I criticised relentlessly as I solved method after method, and produced result after result. At each new step I felt the ground firmly before trusting to it; I looked at each production as though it were that of some hated rival whom I had in my power to thrust down, keep down, by savage search for faults and merciless exposure of each weakness in design, construction or operation. The news of the dramatic death of Brathwaite and some inkling of the fact that he had for so many years been engaged in scientific research, every vestige of result from which was believed to have perished with “the old Professor”--as the journals of the day styled him--had startled the city; and gave three-column stories, spread headed, sub-headed and padded _ad nauseam_; no two agreeing, save that in all “the fire-fiend” was rampant; “holocaust” and “pyre,” “cremation” and “conflagration,” vied with each other in harrowing up the reader’s nerves. The suburban press took up the strain in more subdued tones and in less space, although no more grammatically--while the far-away sheets of Boom City or Dead Man’s Gulch paragraphed it as the shocking self-destruction of Robert Batterman, an eccentric metropolitan hermit who had a mania for collecting old almanacs and back numbers of periodicals. “Such is fame,” said Byron, “to have one’s name misspelled in the ‘Gazette.’” The Masonic body of which Brathwaite had been for so many years an unobtrusive member announced a Lodge of Sorrow in memory of the deceased brother; and most imposing were the ceremonies, most impressive were the addresses upon that occasion. From the pamphlet account of this function, printed by resolution of the Lodge, I excerpt the remarks of M. W. Past Master Ashley, as showing in some degree the respect in which Brathwaite was held by those who knew him, and the veneration which his upright life, his charitable although retiring disposition, and his many and varied accomplishments, inspired. EULOGIA. “My Brethren:-- “‘Dear beauteous death, the jewel of the just,’ has been laid upon the breast of him who was and is in the Mystic Tie your brother and mine; in every sense, the brother of all mankind.