Ruth had two sisters,—Grace and Jessie. Now Grace and Jessie were twins, and everybody praised their blue eyes and rosy cheeks, and when they laughed, people said, "How sweetly they smile!"—and when they wept, people said, "Poor little ones!" and immediately took them in their arms, and strove to bring back the dimpling smile to their faces.
Grace and Jessie played together always, and little Ruth, who was younger than either of them, was left often alone. No one ever called her beautiful, nor stroked her hair, nor kissed her brow; and when she stood by the side of the twin sisters at the gate, and the people, in passing, praised the flaxen curls of Grace and Jessie, then they would turn towards her, and, their smiles
vanishing, they would regard her with a pitiful air, turning silently away. Then she would creep off by herself into some favorite nook of the garden, thoroughly ashamed that she should so far have forgotten herself as to stand by the side of her beautiful sisters.
Her mother, too, often took her in her lap, and, kissing her brow sorrowfully, would exclaim, in sad tones:
"My poor, plain child,—my dear homely Ruth!"
Her father never caressed her. His love seemed to be kept for the twins, whose two bright faces peered over his chair, and whose glad voices were always ready to greet him on his return home.
And still Ruth loved her father so much, and, nestling close in the corner of the garden away off by herself, mourned that he never kissed her, nor called her his dear, pretty Ruth.
"O," thought the child, "how I do wish I could do something for my father, which might please him, so that only once he might call me his
dear child! O, why was not I made a twin?" Thus the poor child mourned to herself.
She had a doll, which she made her constant companion, and she played it was very lovely like Grace and Jessie; she told it all her griefs, and really came to feel that the doll understood all she said to it.