on her new and unfinished cap, and had then only a small brown cotton skull-cap on her head, she raised both her hands to her head to be certain of this, and then said, “Do, Molly, there’s a dear! answer the bell; for such a figure as I am, I could not go before master, no how.  See, I have unpicked this old cap for a little bit of French edging at the back.”  Molly looked a little peevish; but her cap was on her head, and up stairs she went.  Mr. Vanderclump was sitting before the fire, puffing lustily from his eternal pipe.  “Take away,” he said abruptly, “and put the leetle table here.”  He pointed and growled, and the sagacious Molly understood.  She placed the table beside him, and upon it the punch, which he had been drinking.  “Batee, my poor Batee!” said Mr. Vanderclump, who had not yet noticed that Betty was absent.  “It is not Betty, but Molly, sir!” replied the latter damsel, in a voice of childlike simplicity.  “Hah!” said he, apparently considering for a moment, “Hah!  Batee, Mollee, all the same!  Mollee, my poor Mollee, you are a goot girl!  Get up to-morrow morning, my poor Mollee, and put on your best gown, and I will marry you!” Molly, was, as she afterwards declared, struck all of a heap.  She gaped, and gasped with astonishment; and then a power of words were rushing and racing up her throat to her tongue’s end:  a glance at her master stopped their explosion.  His hands were in his pockets, his face towards the fire, his pipe in his mouth.  “Yes, sir,” she replied, humbly and distinctly.  A few tears trickled down her cheeks, as she curtseyed low at the door, and disappeared.  She knew his ways, she thought within herself, as she walked very slowly down the stairs, and she congratulated herself that she had not risked another word in reply.  “And now, Betty,” she said, as she entered the kitchen, “I’ll put the finishing stitch to my cap, and go to bed, for master will want nothing more to-night.”  She sat down quietly to work, and conversed quietly with Betty, not disclosing a word of her new prospects, Betty, however, observed that she took off the trimming with which her new cap had been already half-adorned.  “Why, bless me, Molly!” she cried, “you are not going to put on that handsome white satin bow, are you?”—­“Why, yes!  I think I shall,” replied Molly, “for now I look at your cap, with that there yellow riband upon it, mine seems to me quite old-maidish.”

The next morning, Molly got up before her sister, and put on her best gown and her new cap.  The morning was dark and dull, and Betty was sleepy, and Molly kept the window-curtain and the bed-curtains closely drawn.  Unsuspected, she slipped out of the chamber, her shawl and her bonnet in her hand.

As the clock struck eight, Molly was standing beside her master before the rails of the marriage-altar; and, not long after, she burst upon the astonished eyes of her sister, as Mrs. Vanderclump.

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