“Yes. Horatio must have known you were coming, for he left us a little picric acid.” “It feels good.” On learning that he would not be able to wear a coat again in several days. Chase Mahan declared that it would ease his pain if he had something to do. If it rained, he’d like to clean up the burned tract. Might he count on the fire-fighters to return for two or three days and bring their axes? That night the home-comers slept to the welcome sound of rain on the roof, but Chase Mahan sat up till nearly dawn, forgetting his wounds in the Tacitus which he had himself discovered. The next day went as planned. Down came the charred stubs, and were heaped and burned. On the second day the farmers came again with teams and scrapers, and the morning of the third day dawned on a beautiful smooth plaisance. Chapter 65. Terbium As he paced the deck on the return voyage, Marvin came again to the conclusion that he had been refused because Jean was unwilling to leave her father. She was unwilling even to discuss the matter, lest she give way. Dr. Rich was too old and too deeply attached to his northern retreat to be transplanted to a city. Well, nothing could please Jean’s lover more than to settle down there with her in the woods, provided he could find something to do to make a living. Were he in better favor with Asher Ferry, he might perhaps hope to be employed in connection with that vast tract of Michigan land. Asher would certainly need chemists in his new northern domain, and a car might make it possible for one of them to live at some distance from the tract. But Asher was out of the question. What then? Might not a chemist put up a diminutive laboratory and manufacture something at Upper Encampment? Chemists had been reduced ere this to making tooth-paste or pills. Marvin grimly fancied himself naming a tooth-paste for Ojeeg or the Red Leaf. Of course there was one other wild suggestion, the suggestion of Lord Fortinbras that Chase Mahan might take his two millions of profit, when he got it, and endow a research laboratory. The notion would never have entered the old baron’s head but for a guilty conscience. Without lifting a hand he had made a million pounds from the sale of virgin American pine. But Chase Mahan would not be warranted in entrusting a research laboratory to a son who was but a tyro in physics. He had come away from England without making any effort to visit Oxford or Cambridge or Manchester. He leaned over the rail and saw those bits of Eden looking up at him from within the dark crystal. There was the Cavendish laboratory at Cambridge, with Sir Joseph Thomson running his fingers through his ambrosial locks as he evoked hypothesis after hypothesis to be tested by his pupils. Sir Joseph had been the Mecca of the world’s physicists for many a year.