HE Fairfaxes were married at Trinity Church, Boston, and the Bishop of Boston performed the ceremony. The Governor of Massachusetts gave the bride away, and there was no one present at the affair but Mayflower descendants and a few noblemen from Europe, who came by way of Washington to grace the affair.
The Boston newspapers were filled to overflowing with accounts of the wedding, a description of the presents and the life history of the contracting parties. They told in detail the genealogy of both the bride and groom.
The bride was an heiress in a moderate way, but the groom, who was an F. F. V., was poor, so that he positively refused to have his wife touch a penny of the money she inherited. “I am going to work,” said he to the relatives and friends of the bride. “I have secured a position as a clerk on the Panama Canal, and we shall sail to-morrow.”
“Bravo!” said every one.
Mrs. Fairfax packed her costly wedding presents away and stored them among other family treasures in the attic of her great-aunt in Cambridge, and with only about twelve trunks of dainty clothing and household things she departed with her wedded love.
She was a graduate of Wellesley College, and she had, in addition, studied domestic economy, so she gave out for publication that she intended doing her own housework on the Canal Zone.
“A sensible and model woman,” said the newspapers. Mothers talked about the model Mrs. Fairfax to their daughters, in the hope that it would influence their own futures; so, you see, gentle reader, what a heroine Mrs. Fairfax was in her native city.
Among Mrs. Fairfax’s wedding presents was one of such a kind as to preclude all possibility of its being left at home in the attic on Brattle street, so a ticket was purchased for it and, attached to a silver chain, this present was led by Mrs. Fairfax to the Pullman palace car which was to convey the newlyweds to New York, from which they embarked for Colon. “Ferdinand De Lesseps” was the name of the present. It was the finest of bull terriers, and Mrs. Fairfax was almost as proud of it as she was of her new husband.
On the ship there were, from the Fairfax point of view, a strange assortment of persons who did not speak the English language as it was spoken in the world to which the pair belonged, but who, strange to say, considered themselves as good, if not better, than the young couple.