“He took precedence at once of the oldest man in the township, who was only eighty-four and not very bright.  I can remember bragging at school about Gran’ther Pendleton, who’d be eighty-nine come next Woodchuck day, and could see to read without glasses.  He had been ailing all his life, ever since the fever he took in the war.  He used to remark triumphantly that he had now outlived six doctors who had each given him but a year to live; ‘and the seventh is going downhill fast, so I hear!’ This last was his never-failing answer to the attempts of my conscientious mother and anxious, dutiful father to check the old man’s reckless indifference to any of the rules of hygiene.

“They were good disciplinarians with their children, and this naughty old man, who would give his weak stomach frightful attacks of indigestion by stealing out to the pantry and devouring a whole mince pie because he had been refused two pieces at the table—­this rebellious, unreasonable, whimsical old madcap was an electric element in our quiet, orderly life.  He insisted on going to every picnic and church sociable, where he ate recklessly of all the indigestible dainties he could lay his hands on, stood in drafts, tired himself to the verge of fainting away by playing games with the children, and returned home, exhausted, animated, and quite ready to pay the price of a day in bed, groaning and screaming out with pain as heartily and unaffectedly as he had laughed with the pretty girls the evening before.

“The climax came, however, in the middle of August, when he announced his desire to go to the county fair, held some fourteen miles down the valley from our farm.  Father never dared let gran’ther go anywhere without himself accompanying the old man, but he was perfectly sincere in saying that it was not because he could not spare a day from the haying that he refused pointblank to consider it.  The doctor who had been taking care of gran’ther since he came to live with us said that it would be crazy to think of such a thing.  He added that the wonder was that gran’ther lived at all, for his heart was all wrong, his asthma was enough to kill a young man, and he had no digestion; in short, if father wished to kill his old grandfather, there was no surer way than to drive fourteen miles in the heat of August to the noisy excitement of a county fair.

“So father for once said ‘No,’ in the tone that we children had come to recognize as final.  Gran’ther grimly tied a knot in his empty sleeve—­a curious, enigmatic mode of his to express strong emotion—­put his one hand on his cane, and his chin on his hand, and withdrew himself into that incalculable distance from the life about him where very old people spend so many hours.