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 the "faculty," which has always distinguished that highly respectable family.

Marrying at a very early age—in opposition, let it be whispered in confidence, to her mother's wishes—and removing to the small manufacturing town where her husband pursued his calling, Jane Pratt had taken a step downward in the social scale. The ignorante which is the prerogative of sweet seventeen, had not been modified by contact with her betters, or even with her equals, and her self-confidence—sometimes called pigheadedness—had received no check. Hence she never suspected the undeniable fact that she was as ignorant of the true science of homœopathy as she was of the higher mathematics. And in spite of ignorance and pigheadedness, Jane Bennett was very successful with her nux vomica and belladonna and what not, and she had little difficulty in persuading her son of the soundness of her views. Anson had received much practical benefit from his mother's treatment of the small ills which had assailed him from time to time; her methods seemed to him rational, her arguments just. When she finally gave him a little manual of "symptoms," and told him it would teach him homœopathy, there appeared, to his mind, to be a great light thrown upon a hitherto dark and tortuous province of human experience. He was very young, very ignorant and very ambitious, and he was but too ready to believe that those little sugar-coated pills were the last and most