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 and her head only shook the harder. When she was alone in her room she could almost always get it steady again. She used to sit in front of the glass, seeing how still she could hold her head; and, curiously enough, this study of her own countenance, so new and yet so fascinating, developed a singular vanity in her which no one would have dreamed of suspecting. Especially of a Sunday, when she had on her "shot-silk" gown, with Brother Ben's pin fastening the broad flat collar, and when her best cap rested on her gray locks, she would look deprecatingly at her fat, amiable old face, and wonder if blue eyes were not most as pretty as black," and whether, if she had not been so deaf, she too might not have had offers like the other women she knew.

It was about this time—that is, when Aunt Betsy was well on in the fifties—that photography was first invented, and her brothers and sisters began coming in with little card pictures of themselves and their families. All the neighborhood was excited about these wonderful likenesses, to be got at three dollars a dozen, and so much more satisfactory than the old daguerreotypes, which one had to turn this way and that to see them at all. Even Grandma was at last persuaded to sit for hers, and it had been in such demand that two dozen had been ordered on the spot, and they had "gone off like hot cakes," as Brother Ben kept saying over and over again.