"You come from a strong anti-slavery family, Lucy, the worst kind," answered Grandfather, good-humoredly. "Webster did seem to many people to sacrifice his ideal in that seventh of March speech two years ago, but he's a keen lawyer yet. His health is broken, though, from the criticism he has suffered. I don't believe he will live much longer. That's why I think you had better go to-day."
"I should like to ever so much," replied Lucy.
"Is it the Goodyear case?" inquired Grandmother.
"Yes," replied Grandfather. "It's his case against Horace Day, who, I think, has been outrageously infringing his patents."
"It's raining a little," remarked Grandmother. "Shall you take us if it keeps on?"
"If you feel like going. If it hadn't been for Mr. Goodyear, you know, you couldn't have gone anyway on such a day," Grandfather added.
"Why couldn't we?" inquired Lucy, after trying to think it out a few seconds.
"My stars! Don't you, a Boston girl, know about Goodyear and his rubber goods?"
"I don't believe so," answered Lucy. "Unless," she added after a pause, "you mean the man that advertises in the _Transcript_ every night. Ever since I could read, I've seen advertisements in the paper about rubber that's been heated to two hundred and eighty degrees."
"Yes, Lucy, that's an advertisement of the Charles Goodyear I mean. I've known him a good many years (he's only a little younger than I, and we were both born in New Haven), and he's had a hard, sad life so far. To be sure, he's reckoned now as one of New Haven's prosperous business men; but unless he wins this suit, his poverty will come back again. Shall I tell you a little about him so that you'll understand some of the references you'll be sure to hear at the trial?"
[Illustration: BIRTHPLACE OF CHARLES GOODYEAR]
Breakfast was over then; and as Grandmother went to the kitchen to give her orders for the day, Grandfather said:
"You and I, Lucy, will sit in front of the fire a little while and talk about Mr. Goodyear. But first you'd better go with Grandmother and let her give you my galoshes and my rubber cap, and her rubber shoes and your own."
A little girl of to-day, on hearing that request, might not know exactly what she had been sent for. Rubber goods were too expensive then to be common, and "rubber shoes" had not been shortened to our "rubbers." The awkward _galoshes_ was just a name for high rubber shoes, or overshoes.