“I am not repining, father, but I do feel so—so disappointed with the outcome of all our hard struggles that I can’t always be cheerful.”
“We’d just begun to get our heads above water when it happened, Jean,” said the old man. “We’d been making a new farm. You see, we’d manumitted our slaves before we left Kaintuck, and we had to begin with our bare hands in this new country and work our way from the ground up. We’d only got a part o’ the children raised when the older ones began to get it in their heads to get married. But our second son took to book-learning, and we sent him off to Tennessee to finish his schooling. That cost a pile o’ money. Then we had to set out the married ones. We’d got things going in tol’ble shape and was beginning to get on our feet again, when Joseph—”
“Do stop, husband. Don’t tell any more; please don’t,” cried the grandmother, nervously stroking the bright young head that nestled in her lap. “I cannot bear to hear it, though I thought I could.”
“Let him go on, grandmother dear! I don’t want to be driven to the schoolmaster for the information that I am bound to get someway. When I have grandchildren of my own, I’ll tell ’em everything they ought to know about the family, and then they won’t be teased by the school-children, as we are.”
“We had to mortgage the farm,” continued the grandfather; “and then there came a financial panic. The wild-cat banks of the country all went to pieces, and the bottom kind o’ fell out o’ things.”
“But why did you borrow money, grandpa? Why was it necessary to mortgage the farms?”
“We did it because we had to stand by Joe in his trouble.”
“What did you hear at school, darling?” asked the grandmother.
“Oh, nothing much. But one day Jim Danover got mad at me because I went head in the class; and he said I needn’t be puttin’ on airs, for everybody knew that my uncle had been hung.”
“Good Lord! has it come to that?” cried the great-grandmother, dropping her knitting to the floor and clasping her withered hands over her knees. “I’ve always told you that you’d better tell the older children about it yourself, John.”