dies." Grandpa, indeed, may sometimes have heard him say that;
and it is the saddest, most hopeless thing in life for elderly people to
come to see that the younger generation is only waiting for them to die.
If Grandpa Edwards had been very infirm, he might not have cared
greatly; but, as I have said, at sixty-seven he was still hale and,
except for a little rheumatism, apparently well.

Tom came home from the Corners that night without having learned
anything of Grandpa Edwards's whereabouts. In the course of the evening
his disappearance became known throughout the vicinity. The first
conjectures were that he had set off on a visit somewhere and would soon
return. Paying visits was not much after his manner of life; yet his
family half believed that he had gone off to cheer himself up a bit.
Jotham and his wife, and Catherine, too, now remembered that he had been
unusually silent for a week. A search of the room he occupied showed
that he had gone away wearing his every-day clothes. I remember that the
old Squire and grandmother Ruth looked grave but said very little.
Grandpa Edwards was not the kind of man to get lost. Of course he might
have had a fall while tramping about and injured himself seriously or
even fatally; but neither was that likely.

For several days, therefore, his family and his neighbors waited for him
to return of his own accord. But when a week or more passed and he did
not come anxiety deepened; and his son and the neighbors bestirred
themselves to make wider inquiries. Tardily, at last, a considerable
party searched the woods and the lake shores; and finally as many as
fifty persons turned out and spent a day and a night looking for him.

"They will not find him," the old Squire remarked with a kind of sad
certainty; and he did not join the searchers himself or encourage us
boys to do so. I think that both he and grandmother Ruth partly feared
that, as the old lady quaintly expressed it, "Jonathan had been left to
take his own life," in a fit of despondency.

The disappearance was so mysterious, indeed, and some people thought so
suspicious, that the town authorities took it up. The selectmen came to
the Edwards farm and made careful inquiries into all the circumstances
in order to make sure there had been nothing like wrongdoing. There was
not, however, the least circumstance to indicate anything of that kind.
Grandfather Jonathan had walked away no one knew where; Jotham and his
wife knew