etter, in which she said: "I should
be sorry to think you consider me so weak as to bend under a change of
fortune to which all are liable." Certainly she will not bend, but she
is obliged to quit school and return to the shattered home.

Before the summer was over, her grandfather, Mr. Lovell, died; whether
the end was hastened by the financial embarrassments in which Mr.
Pickard had involved him, is not said. Mrs. Lovell, the grandmother,
followed her husband in two years,--for Mary, two years of assiduous
nursing and tender care. Perhaps one sentence from a letter at this
time will assist us in picturing her in this exacting service. She
says that she is leading a monotonous existence, that her animal
spirits are not sufficient for both duty and solitude, "And when
evening closes, and my beloved charge is laid peacefully to rest,
excitement ceases, and I am thrown on myself for pleasure."

With the death of the grandmother, the home was broken up, and Mary,
trying to help her father do a little business without capital, went
to New York city as his commercial agent. Her letters to her father
are "almost exclusively business letters," and he on his part gives
her "directions for the sale and purchase, not only of muslins and
moreens, but also of skins, saltpetre, and the like."

Details of this period of her career are not abundant in the Memoirs,
and the death of her father, in 1823, put an end to her business
apprenticeship.

Apparently, she was not entirely destitute. At the time of his
disaster, her father wrote, "As we calculated you would, after some
time, have enough to support yourself, without mental or bodily
exertion." That is, presumably, after the settlement of her
grandfather's estate. As her biographer says, "Every member of her own
family had gone, and she had smoothed the passage of everyone." But
she had many friends, and one is tempted to say, Pity she could not
have settled down in cozy quarters and made herself comfortable.

Indeed she did make a fair start. She joined a couple of friends,
going abroad in search of health, for a visit to England. She had
relatives on the Lovell side, in comfortable circumstances near
London, and an aunt on her father's side, in the north of England, in
straightened circumstances. She resolved to make the acquaintance of
all these relatives.

The party arrived in Liverpool in April, 1824, and for a year and a
half, during which their headquarters were in Lon