Laurence at last hung out that shingle which was to tingle Appleboro into step with the Time-spirit. It was a very happy and important day for the judge and his immediate friends, though Appleboro at large looked on with but apathetic interest. One more little legal light flickering "in our midst" didn't make much difference; we literally have lawyers to burn. So we aren't too enthusiastic over our fledglings; we wait for them to show us--which is good for them, and sometimes better for us. This fledgling, however, was of the stuff which endures. Laurence was one of those dynamic and dangerous people who not only think independently themselves, but have the power to make other people think. No one who came in contact with him escaped this; it seemed to crackle electrically in the air around him; he was a sort of human thought-conductor, and he shocked many a smug and self-satisfied citizen into horrific life before he had done with him. If this young man had not been one of the irreproachable Maynes Appleboro might have set him down as a pestilent and radical theorist and visionary. But fortunately for us and himself he was a Mayne; and the Maynes have been from the dawn of things Carolinian "a good family." I don't think I have ever seen two people so mutually delight in each other's powers as did John Flint and Laurence Mayne. The Butterfly Man was immensely proud of Laurence's handsome person and his grace of speech and manner; he had even a more profound respect for his more solid attainments, for his own struggle upward had deepened his regard for higher education. As for Laurence, he thought his friend marvelous; what he had overcome and become made him in the younger man's eyes an incarnate proof of the power of will and of patience. The originality and breadth of his views fired the boy's imagination and broadened his personality. The two complemented each other. The Butterfly Man's workroom had a fascination for others than Laurence. It was a sort of Open Question Club. Here Westmoreland came to air his views with a free tongue and to ride his hobbies with a gallant zest; here the major, tugging at his goatee, his glasses far down on his nose, narrated in spicy chapters the Secret Social History of Appleboro. Here the judge--for he, too, had fallen into the habit of strolling over of an evening--sunk in the old Morris chair, his cigar gone cold in his fingers, reviewed great cases. And sometimes Eustis stopped by, spoke in his modest fashion of his experiments, and left us all the better for his quiet strength. And Flint, with his eyes alive and watchful behind his glasses, listened with that air which made one like to tell him things. Laurence declared that he got his post-graduate course in John Flint's workroom, and that the Butterfly Man wasn't the least of his teachers.