m.

I have been thus particular in noting the words of the service, partly
because they pleased me, partly because I have since had some occasion
to recall them, and partly because I remember having wondered, at the
time, how many married men and women of your and my acquaintance, if
honestly subjecting their union to the test and full interpretation and
remotest bearing of such vows as these, could live in the sight of God
and man as "lawfully wedded" husband and wife.

Weddings are always very sad things to me; as much sadder than burials
as the beginning of life should be sadder than the end of it. The
readiness with which young girls will flit out of a tried, proved, happy
home into the sole care and keeping of a man whom they have known three
months, six, twelve, I do not profess to understand. Such knowledge is
too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it. But that may
be because I am fifty-five, an old maid, and have spent twenty years in
boarding-houses.

A woman reads the graces of a man at sight. His faults she cannot
thoroughly detect till she has been for years his wife. And his faults
are so much more serious a matter to her than hers to him!

I was thinking of this the day before the wedding. I had stepped in from
the kitchen to ask Mrs. Bird about the salad, when I came abruptly, at
the door of the sitting-room, upon as choice a picture as one is likely
to see.

The doors were open through the house, and the wind swept in and out. A
scarlet woodbine swung lazily back and forth beyond the window. Dimples
of light burned through it, dotting the carpet and the black-and-white
marbled oilcloth of the hall. Beyond, in the little front parlor, framed
in by the series of doorways, was Harrie, all in a cloud of white. It
floated about her with an idle, wavelike motion. She had a veil like
fretted pearls through which her tinted arm shone faintly, and the
shadow of a single scarlet leaf trembled through a curtain upon her
forehead.

Her mother, crying a little, as mothers will cry the day before the
wedding, was smoothing with tender touch a tiny crease upon the cloud; a
bridesmaid or two sat chattering on the floor; gloves, and favors, and
flowers, and bits of lace like hoar frost, lay scattered about; and the
whole was repictured and reflected and reshaded in the great
old-fashioned mirrors before which Harrie turned herself about.

It seemed a pity that Myron Sharpe should miss that, so I c