eat. It was headed A DAZZLING AFFAIR and it ran
thus:

"For some time we have realised that we have not been doing full justice
to the weddings that occur in this town; we have been using a repressed
and obsolete style which is painful to those who enter into the joyous
spirit of such occasions, and last night's wedding in the family of the
patrician Skinners we assigned to our gentlemanly and urbane Mr. J.
Mortimer Montague, late of the publicity department of the world-famed
Robinson Circus and Menagerie. The following graceful account from Mr.
Montague's facile pen is the most accurate and satisfactory report of a
nuptial event we have ever recorded in these columns."

And thereafter followed this:

"Last evening, just as the clock in the steeple struck nine, a vast
concourse of the beauty and the chivalry of our splendid city, composing
wealth beyond the dreams of the kings of India and forming a galaxy only
excelled in splendour by the knightly company at the Field of the Cloth
of Gold, assembled to witness the marriage of Miss May Skinner and Mr.
John Fortesque. The great auditorium was a bower of smilax and
chrysanthemums, bewildering, amazing, superb in its verdant labyrinth.
As the clock was striking the hour, the ten-thousand-dollar pipe-organ
filled the edifice with strains of most seductive, entrancing music,
played by Miss Jane Brown, the only real left-handed organist in the
civilised world. Then came the wedding party, magnificent, radiant,
resplendent with the glittering jewels of the Orient, dazzling with
gorgeousness, stupefying and miraculous in its revelation of beauty.
There were six handsome ushers--count them--six, ten bridesmaids--ten--a
bevy of real, live, flower-bearing fairies, captured at an immense
outlay of time and money in far Caucasia. The bride's resplendent
costume and surpassing beauty put the blush upon the Queen of Sheba,
made Hebe's effulgence fade as the moon before the sun; and as the long
courtly train of knights errant and ladies-in-waiting passed the
populace, they presented a regal spectacle, never equalled since the
proud Cleopatra sailed down the perfumed lotus-bearing Nile in her
gilded pageant to meet Marc Antony, while all the world stood agape at
the unheard-of triumph.

"To describe the bride's costume beggars the English language; and human
imagination falls faint and feeble before the Herculean task. From the
everlasting stars she stole the glittering diamonds th