wo years older than our old Squire, and a friend and neighbor of
his from boyhood. With this youthful friend, Jock, the old Squire--who
then of course was young--had journeyed to Connecticut to buy merino
sheep: that memorable trip when they met with Anice and Ruth Pepperill,
the two girls whom they subsequently married and brought home.

For the last seventeen years matters had not been going prosperously or
happily at the Edwards farm. Jonathan's only son, Jotham (Catherine and
Tom's father), had married at the age of twenty and come home to live.
The old folks gave him the deed of the farm and accepted only a
"maintenance" on it--not an uncommon mode of procedure. Quite naturally,
no doubt, after taking the farm off his father's hands, marrying and
having a family of his own, this son, Jotham, wished to manage the farm
as he saw fit. He was a fairly kind, well-meaning man, but he had a
hasty temper and was a poor manager. His plans seemed never to prosper,
and the farm ran down, to the great sorrow and dissatisfaction of his
father, Jonathan, whose good advice was wholly disregarded. The farm
lapsed under a mortgage; the buildings went unrepaired, unpainted; and
the older man experienced the constant grief of seeing the place that
had been so dear to him going wrong and getting into worse condition
every year.

Of course we young folks did not at that time know or understand much
about all this; but I have learned since that Jonathan often unbosomed
his troubles to the old Squire, who sympathized with him, but who could
do little to improve matters.

Jotham's wife was a worthy woman, and I never heard that she did not
treat the old folks well. It was the bad management and the constantly
growing stress of straitened circumstances that so worried Jonathan.

Then, two years before we young folks came home to live at the old
Squire's, Aunt Anice, as the neighbors called her, died suddenly of a
sharp attack of pleurisy. That left Jonathan alone in the household of
his son and family. He seemed, so the old Squire told me later, to lose
heart entirely after that, and sat about or wandered over the farm in a
state of constant discontent.

I fear, too, that his grandson, Tom, was not an unmixed comfort to him.
Tom did not mean to hurt his grandfather's feelings. He was a
good-hearted boy, but impetuous and somewhat hasty. More than once we
heard him go on to tell what great things he meant to do at home, "after
grandpa