Laura kissed me, with tears in her sisterly eyes.  She never talks fine, and went directly out of the room after this.

I thought that women shouldn’t swear at all, or, if they did, should break their oaths as gracefully as I did mine, when I whispered it was “so good of him, to be willing I should stay in the cottage where I had always lived, and where every rose-tree and lilac knew me!” And that was true, too.  But not all the truth.  What need to be telling truths all the time?  And what had women tongues for, but to hold them sometimes?  Perhaps “he,” too, would have preferred a journey to Europe, and a house on the Mill-Dam.

Things gradually settled themselves.  My troubles seemed coming to a close by mechanical pressure.  As to the name, it was better than Fire, Famine, and Slaughter,—­and I was to take it into consideration, any way, and get used to it, if I could.  The other trouble I put aside for the moment.  After it was concluded on that the wedding should be strictly private, it was not necessary to buy my aunt’s present under a few days, and I could have the decided advantage, in that way, of avoiding a duplicate.

The Monday of my marriage sped away swiftly.  Polly had come up early to say to “Laury” (for Polly was a free and independent American girl of forty-five) that “there’d be so much goin’ to the door, and such, Betsy Ann had best be handy by, to answer the bell.  Fin’ly, she’s down there with her bunnet off, and goin’ to stay.”

As usual, Polly’s plans were excellent, and adopted.  There would be all the wedding-presents to arrive, congratulatory notes, etc.  Everything to arrange, and a thousand and one things that neither one nor three pairs of hands could do.  How I wished Betsy Ann would consent to dress like an Oriental child, and look pretty and picturesque,—­like a Barbary slave bearing vessels of gold and silver chalices, instead of her silly pointed waist and “mantilly,” which she persisted in wearing, and which, of course, gave the look only of a stranger and sojourner in the land!

I hoped she was a careful child,—­there were so many things which might be spoiled, even if they came in boxes.  Betsy Ann was instructed, on pain of—­almost death, to be very, very careful, and to put everything on the table in the library.  She was by no means to unpack an article, not even a bouquet.  Laura and myself preferred to arrange everything ourselves.  We proposed to place each of the presents, for that evening only, in the library, and spread them out as usual; but the very next day, we determined, they should all be put away, wherever they were to go,—­of course, we could not tell where, till we saw them.  That was Laura’s taste, and had come, on reflection, to be mine.

Laura said she should make me presents only of innumerable stitches:  which she had done.  Polly, whom it is both impossible and irrelevant to describe, took the opportunity to scrub the house from top to bottom.  Her own wedding-present to me, homely though it was, I wrapped in silver paper, and showed it to her lying in state on the library-table, to her infinite amusement.