BETSY PATTERSON. 515 had poverty to contend with', pecuniary difficulties to torture and mortify me ; and but for my industry and energy, and my determination to conquer at least a decent sufficiency to live on in Europe, I might have remained as poor as you saw me in the year 1816." She speaks in this strange letter of having been dis- inherited by her father. This was not quite true, although the poor, deluded woman was the plague of her father's declining years. It is but common charity to think that the acuteness of her mortification had impaired in some degree her reason. She spent many years hankering after that false European life, and heaping every kind of contempt upon her native land. She appears to have been incapable of human affection. She abandoned her father and his home, to roam around among the titled idlers of Europe, at a time when he peculiarly needed her presence and aid. He wrote to her thus in 1815, soon after the death of his wife : " What will the world think of a woman who had recently followed her mother and last sister to the grave, and quit her father's house, where duty and necessity call for her attention as the only female of the family left, and thought proper to abandon all to seek for admiration in foreign countries?" The old man intimates that he, too, regarded her as a person not quite sound in mind. He died in 1835, aged eighty-three years, leaving an immense estate, and the longest will ever recorded in Baltimore. He did not dis" inherit his daughter, Betsy ; but left her a few small houses and lots ; which, however, greatly increased in value after his death. He explains the smallness of his bequest thus : " The conduct of my daughter Betsy has through life been so disobedient that in no instance has she ever con- sulted my opinions or feelings ; indeed, she has caused
