banquets, which we
heartily enjoyed, since we were boarders, and always hungry--and how we
talked! Of what? Why, good heaven! did I not hold a membership in the
library, and were we not both lightning-quick readers? Why, we had the
whole library to talk over; besides, there was the country to save! and
as Mollie didn't really know one party from the other, she felt herself
particularly fitted for the task of settling public questions.

Then, suddenly, she began to expect another visitor--a _wee_ visitor,
whom we hoped would remain permanently, and, goodness mercy! I nearly
lost my reputation through the chambermaid finding in my work-basket some
half-embroidered, tiny, tiny jackets. Whereupon she announced to the
servants, in full assembly, that I had too soft a tongue, and was deeper
than the sea, but _she_ had her eyes open, and, judging from what she
found in my work-basket, I was either going to buy a monkey for a pet, or
I had thrown away my character completely.

Mrs. Ogden was with me when the landlady, stony-eyed and rattling with
starch and rectitude, came to inquire into the contents of my
work-basket. Her call was brief, but satisfactory, and shortly after her
exit we heard her, at the top of her lungs, giving me a clean bill of
health--morally speaking--and denouncing the prying curiosity of the
maids. But we had had a scare, and Mollie implored me either not to help
her any more or to lock up my work-basket.

"Oh, no," I said, "I'll rest my head upon the chambermaid's breast and
confide all my intentions to her, then surely my character will be safe."

However, when the _wee_ stranger arrived, she might well have wondered
whom she belonged to. At all events she "goo-gooed and gurgled," and
smiled her funny three-cornered smile at me as readily as at her mother,
and my friendly rights in her were so far recognized by others that
questions about her were often put to me in her mother's very presence,
who laughingly declared that only in bed with the light out did she feel
absolutely sure that the baby was hers.

Mollie used to say the only really foolish thing she ever caught me in
was "Protestantism." It was a great grief to us all that I could not be
godmother, but though baby had a Protestant father, the Church flatly
refused to wink at a godmother of that forsaken race.

When, in God's good time, a tiny sister came to baby, she was called
Clara, but my friend had made a solemn vow before the altar,