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."
On the very first day of a Christmas vacation about forty years ago Jimmie Granger broke his leg coasting. That meant six weeks in bed and no more of the wonderful coasting of that winter. Jimmie was only twelve years old, and he found it hard to lie still and be cheerful while the other fellows were having so much fun. Every day seemed a week long until he was allowed to sit up; even then each seemed three times as long as usual.
Jimmie's Uncle Francis was so sorry for his unlucky little nephew that he always brought something "to kill time" when he came to spend Sunday at Jimmie's home just outside the big city. Two weeks after the accident Jimmie received from his Uncle Francis the present he liked best of all. It was a small printing press, something entirely new to Jimmie, who had never seen one before, and never had thought very much about how books and newspapers are actually made.
"If you'll print me every week until you can walk again the _Home Record_, a newspaper page four columns wide and ten inches long, giving the news of the house, and of the neighborhood, too, if you like, I'll give you another double runner, a better sled than the old broken one."
