gged from his office on a busy morning, forced to rush home and
get into his cut-away coat, and then marched to the church by his wife.
One of these men, much hustled, has forgotten to have his shoes shined.
He is intensely conscious of them, and tries to hide them behind his
wife's skirt as they walk up the aisle. Accidentally he steps upon it,
and gets a look over the shoulder which lifts his diaphragm an inch and
turns his liver to water. This man will be courtmartialed when he
reaches home, and he knows it. He wishes that some foreign power would
invade the United States and burn down all the churches in the country,
and that the bride, the bridegroom and all the other persons interested
in the present wedding were dead and in hell.

The ushers do their best to seat these wedding guests in some sort of
order, but after a few minutes the crowd at the doors becomes so large
that they have to give it up, and thereafter all they can do is to hold
out their right arms ingratiatingly and trust to luck. One of them steps
on a fat woman's skirt, tearing it very badly, and she has to be helped
back to the vestibule. There she seeks refuge in a corner, under a
stairway leading up to the steeple, and essays to repair the damage
with pins produced from various nooks and crevices of her person.
Meanwhile the guilty usher stands in front of her, mumbling apologies
and trying to look helpful. When she finishes her work and emerges from
her improvised dry-dock, he again offers her his arm, but she sweeps
past him without noticing him, and proceeds grandly to a seat far
forward. She is a cousin to the bride's mother, and will make a report
to every branch of the family that all six ushers disgraced the ceremony
by appearing at it far gone in liquor.

Fifteen minutes are consumed by such episodes and divertisements. By the
time the clock in the steeple strikes twelve the church is well filled.
The music of the organist, who has now reached Mendelssohn's Spring Song
for the third and last time, is accompanied by a huge buzz of whispers,
and there is much craning of necks and long-distance nodding and
smiling. Here and there an unusually gorgeous hat is the target of many
converging glances, and of as many more or less satirical criticisms. To
the damp funeral smell of the flowers at the altar, there has been added
the cacodorous scents of forty or fifty different brands of talcum and
rice powder. It begins to grow warm in the church,