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. Like the North American Indian, the race of Pollies is fast going out of American life. You read an advertisement of "an American servant who wants a place in a genteel family," and visions of something common in American households, when you were children, come up to your mind's eye. Without considering the absurdity of an American girl calling herself by such a name, your eyes fill with tears at the thought of the faithful and loving service of years ago, when neither sickness, nor sorrow, nor death itself separated the members of the household, but the nurse-maid was the beloved friend, living and dying under the same roof that witnessed her untiring and faithful devotion. So, when you look after this "American servant," you find alien blood, lip-service, a surface-warmth that flatters, but does not delude,--a fidelity that fails you in sickness, or increased toil, or the prospect of higher wages; and you say to the "American servant,"-- "How long have you been in Boston?" "Born in Boston, Ma'm,--in Eliot Street, Ma'm."