Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

i8o ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
ning Morris died in 1838, having had for years serious trouble
with her eyes, which resulted finally in blindness. She was
sixty-four years old when she died.
The third marriage of Grandfather Benjamin Morris was
a great surprise to the family. His eldest daughter, Sallie,
married a man by the name of Yeager and went to Tennessee
to live. Grandfather Morris decided to go to visit this
daughter, and so for a time he left Mr. and Mrs. Isaac Morris,
who were then keeping house for him. What was their sur-
prise one summer day on looking down the road, to see a strange
procession approaching — Grandfather Benjamin Morris and
a new wife, riding in on packhorses quite unannounced! The
great heat and dust almost disguised both bride and groom.
I heard Miss Jerusha Spinning tell of the shock it was to them
all. I gather it was a bitter disappointment to Mr. and Mrs.
Isaac Morris. They had rented the home farm from his
father and were permanently settled, as they supposed, and
here came the unexpected in the form of the newly wedded
pair, blistered by the sun and soiled by the dust and quite
ready to settle down in the house the son was so happily
occupying. There was nothing to do but for Mr. Isaac Morris
to move out of the brick house, and this he did, purchasing
the Green Tree Tavern and re-establishing his home there.
When the wife from Tennessee died Benjamin Morris went
to live once more with his son Isaac, and so he was at Green
Tree when we visited the family there. He was an old man
of eighty then, I should judge. I remember the brick house he
had built in an early day; the shade trees he had planted in
his prime and which protected the front of the house from the
afternoon sunshine; the orchards still bearing fine apples—the
scene of his hfe's work. As I rode by his old home with him
one day, he pointed out to me the barn and told me that when
it was in the course of erection his younger son, a lad in his
teens, had climbed on a ladder to the roof and had fallen from
there and broken his hip. Despite the best medical aid of
that time lockjaw set in and the boy died. His voice trembled
as he related the story, the sadness of which the years had failed
to obliterate.