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.
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