he might be glad for the
brass bedsteads and hair mattresses which abounded at the Ridge House,
and which were really more in accordance with his luxurious tastes than
the feather beds and high four-posters which had done duty at Hardy
Manor for more years than he could remember.

Over four hundred invitations were given to the wedding, as Mrs. Browne
said she "didn't mean to make nobody mad." But she did offend more
people than if her party had been more select, for when Mrs. Peter
Stokes, the truckman's wife, heard that her next door neighbor, Mrs. Asa
Noaks, the hackman's wife, had received an invitation and she had not,
her indignation knew no bounds, and she wondered who _Miss Ike Browne_
thought she was, and if she had forgotten that she once went out to work
like any other hired girl; and when Susan Slocum, whose mother took in
washing, heard that her friend Lucy Smith, who worked in the mill, was
invited and she was not, she persuaded her mother to roll up the four
dozen pieces which had been sent from the Ridge to be washed, and return
them with the message that if she wa'n't good enough to go to the
wedding she wa'n't good enough to wash the weddin' finery. This so
disturbed poor Mrs. Browne, who really wished to please every body, that
but for the interference of Allen and Augusta she would have gone
immediately to the offended washerwoman with an apology, and an earliest
request to be present at the wedding.

"Don't for pity's sake, ask any more of the scum," Allen said, adding,
that if she had not invited any of them no one would have been slighted.

"Well, I don't know," Mrs. Browne rejoined, with a sigh; "I can't quite
forget when I was _scum_ myself, and knew how it felt."

On the whole, however, everything went smoothly, and the grand affair
came off one November night when the air was as soft and balmy as in
early summer, and the full moon was sailing through a cloudless sky as
carriage after carriage made its way to the brilliantly lighted house
through the dense crowd of curious people which filled the road in
front, and even stretched to the left along the garden fence. All the
factory hands were there, and all the boys in town, with most of the
young girls, and many of the women whose rank in life was in what Allen
called the scum, forgetting that but for his father's money he might
have been there too.

There were four bridemaids in all, and their dresses and trains were
something wonderful t