It was not the fault of the younger son that Ol' Bengtsa had taken
up his abode with the widow of the elder son, for he had begged the
father more than a hundred times to come and live with him. The
father's refusal to accept this offer seemed almost like an act of
injustice; for because of it the son got the name of being mean and
hard-hearted among those who knew the old man was badly off. Still,
there was no ill-feeling between the two.

The son, accompanied by his wife and children, always drove down to
the Ashdales over the steep and perilous mountain road once every
summer, just to spend a day with his father.

If people had only known how badly he and his wife felt every time
they saw the wretched hovel, the ramshackle outhouse, the stony
potato patch, and the sister-in-law's ragged children, they would
have understood how his heart went out to his father. The worst of
all was that the father persisted in giving a big party in their
honour. Every time they bade the old man good-bye they begged him
not to invite all the neighbours in when they came again the next
year; but he was obdurate; he would not forego his yearly feast,
though he could ill afford the expense. Seeing how aged and broken
he looked, one would hardly have thought there was so much of the
old happy-go-lucky Ol' Bengtsa of Lusterby still left in him, but
the desire to do things on a grand scale still clung to him. It had
caused him misfortune from which he could never recover.

The son had learned inadvertently that the old man and the
sister-in-law scrimped the whole year just to be able to give a
grand spread on the day he was at home. And then it was nothing but