ppose those great friends of yours, the nerve specialists,
would object to my telling you a story, do you? It's very quiet and
unexciting. You're not too busy?"

"Busy! I've forgotten the meaning of the word! I don't dare to be!"

"Very well, then; I mean to carry you back to the stony little farm in the
Green Mountains, where I had the extreme good luck to be born and raised.
You've heard me speak of Hillsboro; and the story is all about my
great-grandfather, who came to live with us when I was a little boy."

"Your great-grandfather?" said the other incredulously. "People don't
remember their great-grandfathers!"

"Oh, yes, they do, in Vermont. There was my father on one farm, and my
grandfather on another, without a thought that he was no longer young, and
there was 'gran'ther' as we called him, eighty-eight years old and just
persuaded to settle back, let his descendants take care of him, and
consent to be an old man. He had been in the War of 1812--think of that,
you mushroom!--and had lost an arm and a good deal of his health there. He
had lately begun to get a pension of twelve dollars a month, so that for
an old man he was quite independent financially, as poor Vermont farmers
look at things; and he was a most extraordinary character, so that his
arrival in our family was quite an event.

"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 ind