"I wonder how much money Goodyear had to pay for his victory," commented Grandmother.
"Oh, Webster will make money. Of course Goodyear won't have to pay it all, for several rubber firms united with him against Day to protect their own interests. The talk among the lawyers when I came away was that Webster would get somewhere in the vicinity of twenty-five thousand dollars. I don't believe Goodyear even in these last years has made so much as that above his expenses. But he's generosity itself when he has anything to give. What do you suppose he's sent to Mr. Webster for a present?"
"Oh, I don't know. He's so unpractical that he'd give his house away if some one wanted it," answered Grandmother, whose own good judgment could not be denied.
"I think you're a little severe," answered her husband. "But you won't be surprised to know that he's sent to Marshfield that handsome thoroughbred that he drove Webster to the court house with, because Webster admired the animal so much."
"Just exactly like him!" was the response. "He'll probably wish some day he had the money that colt would bring."
Lucy did not go to Trenton again for eight years. On her next visit, strangely enough, Grandfather's household was again talking of the beloved, unpractical dreamer, who by this time had sacrificed his life in the interests of humanity. For Mr. Goodyear had come to the end of his useful, honored, but difficult career. In spite of his triumphant success, his health had been permanently broken by hard work and worry, and his last years had not been entirely free from the occasional threatenings of poverty.
Indeed, by an unlucky circumstance, again his misfortune but not his fault, he was thrown once more for a short time into a debtors' prison when he was visiting France on a business trip. But the friends who knew him pitied him, trusted him, and honored him to the end; and though Lucy Hobart is now almost seventy-eight years old and has seen most of the prominent Americans of the later nineteenth century, she remembers no one who worked harder or suffered more for the good of humanity than the undaunted Goodyear who insisted, "If it is to be done, it must be done and it will be done. Somebody will yet thank me for it."