Page:Pratt portraits - sketched in a New England suburb (IA prattportraitssk00full).pdf/246

 yet with a light-hearted laugh, "there isn't a single person courting me. What am I to do about it?"

To the old lady it was no laughing matter. She frowned a little and looked slightly contemptuous. The rising generation seemed to her very slow and unenterprising, in spite of their railroads and telegraphs. Was a man more a man for being whisked over the earth's surface at the rate of twenty miles an hour? Stuff! How many of them would walk from Framingham to Boston and back, as her grandfather had done, to fetch a betrothal ring for his sweetheart? She wore the ring to-day, a thin gold circlet with the outlines of a coffin just discernible inside. The words, "Till Death" had worn quite away since it came into her possession.

But Old Lady Pratt's mind did not often dwell upon the rising generation and its shortcomings. Even the great-great-grandson, in whose small person the family beheld its fifth generation among the living, had but a transient hold upon her attention. From him her thoughts wandered to her own grandchildren and their pranks, and there were certain reminiscences, especially of Uncle James, the eldest, which the children were never tired of hearing.

"Grandma," they would ask, "how did that spot come on the ceiling?"

Now there was in reality no spot whatever on the ceiling. It had had many a coat of white-