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 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.