e six thousand dollars.

Orion returned to the law business, and I suppose he remained in that
harness off and on for the succeeding quarter of a century, but so far
as my knowledge goes he was only a lawyer in name, and had no clients.

[Sidenote: (1890.)]

My mother died, in her eighty-eighth year, in the summer of 1890. She
had saved some money, and she left it to me, because it had come from
me. I gave it to Orion and he said, with thanks, that I had supported
him long enough and now he was going to relieve me of that burden, and
would also hope to pay back some of that expense, and maybe the whole of
it. Accordingly, he proceeded to use up that money in building a
considerable addition to the house, with the idea of taking boarders and
getting rich. We need not dwell upon this venture. It was another of his
failures. His wife tried hard to make the scheme succeed, and if anybody
could have made it succeed she would have done it. She was a good woman,
and was greatly liked. She had a practical side, and she would have made
that boarding-house lucrative if circumstances had not been against her.

Orion had other projects for recouping me, but as they always required
capital I stayed out of them, and they did not materialize. Once he
wanted to start a newspaper. It was a ghastly idea, and I squelched it
with a promptness that was almost rude. Then he invented a wood-sawing
machine and patched it together himself, and he really sawed wood with
it. It was ingenious; it was capable; and it would have made a
comfortable little fortune for him; but just at the wrong time
Providence interfered again. Orion applied for a patent and found that
the same machine had already been patented and had gone into business
and was thriving.

Presently the State of New York offered a fifty-thousand-dollar prize
for a practical method of navigating the Erie Canal with steam
canal-boats. Orion worked at that thing for two or three years, invented
and completed a method, and was once more ready to reach out and seize
upon imminent wealth when somebody pointed out a defect: his steam
canal-boat could not be used in the winter-time; and in the summer-time
the commotion its wheels would make in the water would wash away the
State of New York on both sides.

Innumerable were Orion's projects for acquiring the means to pay off
the debt to me. These projects extended straight through the succeeding
thirty years, but in every case they faile