Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/13

 children, slipped on the steep, narrow backstairs, and fell from top to bottom. From that time she became almost totally deaf. Whether at the same time her faculties were deadened, or whether they had become dull from want of incentive from without, no one knows. Certain it is that she was never the lively, intelligent child that Mrs. Pratt had every right to expect a child of hers to be.

She was now a tall, rather corpulent woman, with somewhat flabby cheeks, and little appearance of "backbone," wherein she presented a striking contrast to her small, upright mother, who even in her eighty-fifth year never leaned back in her chair, and whose bright black eyes could startle Betsy, with a look which seemed positively shrill to the poor old woman, in the eternal silence of her consciousness.

For she grew to be an old woman after a time. See saw her brothers and sisters leave their home, one after another, and make new homes for themselves; her father, who had been gentle with her, "departed hence," and, last of all, Ben, her favorite brother, took to himself a wife, and moved into Bliss Street.

Ben was a kindly soul, of few words, who had always got on better than any one else with Betsy. For instead of trying to talk to her, and getting impatient when she did not hear, he had a way of turning upon her now and then a broad, beaming smile as delightful as a whole conversation. On