Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/168

 spectacles, magnifying-glasses, and kindred aids to vision, was as much a part of the landscape as the factory chimneys a few blocks away, or the ancient meeting-house round the corner. It had always been there, and as far as most people took the trouble to remember, it had always been presided over by Dr. Bennett.

His title was another thing about him which seemed an essential part of his personality, requiring no explanation. The fact that an optician is not usually called "doctor," rarely occurred to any one. There was no more curiosity about Dr. Bennett and his title than there was about the house he lived in, and the inappropriate cupola which perched on the gable-roof like a heavy barnyard fowl on a dove-cote. Thecupola had emanated from the brain of Mrs. Henry Bennett, Dr. Bennett's mother, and if the truth were known, Anson Bennett's unearned title was also the outcome of that active-minded woman's ambition. It was she who had pushed her son into the practice of what she was pleased to call homoeopathy, it was she who had watched with swelling pride and self-satisfaction his brilliant career, it was she who had never become reconciled to its abrupt close at the end of one winter's trial.

Something had happened, twenty-five years ago, to check the brilliant career of this only son, and he, who had formerly been so pliable in his mother's hands, had returned from the field of