bodies, her eye
grew less disturbed and her step firmer,--for the pride of rectitude
overcame the ordinary girlish sensibilities of her sex, and made her the
steadiest at the very instant that the greater portion of females would
have been the most likely to betray their weakness. She had just attained
this forced but respectable tranquillity, as the bailiff, signing to the
crowd to hush its murmurs and to remain motionless, arose, with a manner
that he intended to be dignified, and which passed with the multitude for
a very successful experiment in its way, to open the business in hand by a
short address. The reader is not to be surprised at the volubility of
honest Peterchen, for it was getting to be late in the day, and his
frequent libations throughout the ceremonies would have wrought him up to
even a much higher flight of eloquence, had the occasion and the company
at all suited such a display of his powers.

"We have had a joyous day, my friends" he said; "one whose excellent
ceremonies ought to recall to every one of us our dependence on
Providence, our frail and sinful dispositions, and particularly our
duties to the councils. By the types of plenty and abundance, we see the
bounty of nature, which is a gift from Heaven; by the different little
failures that have been, perhaps, unavoidably made in some of the nicer
parts of the exhibition--and I would here particularly mention the
besotted drunkenness of Antoine Giraud, the man who has impudently
undertaken to play the part of Silenus, as a fit subject of your
attention, for it is full of profit to all hard-drinking knaves--we may
see our own awful imperfections; while, in the order of the whole, and the
perfect obedience of the subordinates, do we find a parallel to the beauty
of a vigilant and exact police and a well-regulated community. Thus you
see, that though the ceremony hath a Heathen exterior, it hath a Christian
moral; God grant that we all forget the former, and remember the latter,
as best becomes our several characters and our common country. And now,
having done with the divinities and their legends--with the exception of
that varlet Silenus, whose misconduct, I promise you, is not to be so
easily overlooked--we will give some attention to mortal affairs. Marriage
is honorable before God and man, and although I have never had leisure to
enter into this holy state myself, owing to a variety of reasons, but
chiefly from my being wedded, as it were,