terminating with buxom Molly. She was indeed a damsel of formidable size, but of just proportions, and employed her brawny arm, in cutting slices from a large loaf of brown bread, which she distributed with great exactness by each trencher, as soon as her father had stocked it with meat, and her mother garnished it with vegetables. There was something pleasing in the sight of so many healthy and cheerful faces, and in the domestic order which evidently prevailed. The first course past in silence, except that Farmer Larkin said to his wife,—
"Do pray, Mammy, put down Tryphosa on the floor, and give her a crust o' bread to gnaw. I can't bear to see ye always a carryin' some burden or other, so that ye get no rest even at meal times."
The wife obediently placed the plump infant in a humbler station, who lifted up its broad blue eyes, as if it thought itself aggrieved, until the father reaching it a piece of bread, said,—"there, baby, larn to take care o' yourself."
It soon became so much absorbed with its fragment of the staff of life, as to make no overtures to return to the arms of it mother. In a short time, each trencher, neatly scraped, was presented to Molly for a slice of the pudding in her vicinity, to which Amariah carefully added the usual condiments. When Tim's plate, in due rotation, was replenished, the farmer said,—
"Amariah, that boy did not do his ta-a-sk this mornin. Don't ye put any lasses on his puddin'. Lazy folks
