Mother looked after the work in his
absence, and was a good manager, but there was much to which she could
not attend. Father was nervously energetic, always working and walking
rapidly. Even after he was sixty years old, although he was a slender
man, only five feet nine inches in height, with his right arm
trembling with palsy, I have known robust young men to complain that
they did not like to work for Pardee Butler, because he would work
with them, and they were ashamed to have such an old man do more than
they did, and he worked so hard that he wore them out. He scarcely
spent an idle moment. Other men could be content to pass their time in
careless conversation, but he never could. Unless he had some subject
that he thought especially worthy of conversation, he said little. He
seldom spoke of what he had done, and scarcely ever related any of the
many experiences of his trips away from home. In his backwoods boyhood
experiences he had learned to make or mend almost every article used
by a farmer.
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