THE great event of the week has not been the Fourth of July, as is vulgarly supposed, but the marriage of Aurelia to young Peplum, the gentlemanly clerk at ——'s dry goods store, heir apparent to $100,000, etc.
I regret to say that Aurelia paid no regard to the advice I gave her two weeks ago. In spite of all my efforts to persuade her to the contrary, she persisted in the hallucination that she was the first woman who had ever been torn away from distracted parents and led, a garlanded victim, to the matrimonial altar. I think she was disappointed that the heavens were not hung with white favors, and that deputations were not present from the various races of the globe, and that business was not suspended. The number of invitations was only limited by the capacity of the house. Everyone of the young ladies invited was a very dear friend, not to have invited whom would have given mortal offence, and sundered friendships, in many cases of several weeks' existence, without which life would have been a blank—Sahara without an oasis—Heaven without a star.
M. Arsene Houssaye, rash man, says that woman is the fourth theologic virtue and the eighth mortal sin. Upon this standard it is safe to say there was present a frightful amount of theologic virtue and mortal sin. I am sure of the latter fact.
The hour for the ceremony had been appointed at 6 P.M. Deeply impressed as was Aurelia with the idea that Columbus, discovering the New World; Galileo, fixing the motion of the earth round the sun; Newton, discovering the laws of gravitation, and Harvey, finding the circulation of the blood—were but every-day common-places compared with this event,—she had, nevertheless, found it impossible to convince the Directors of the Michigan Central Railroad of that fact. The result was that trains ran at the usual hour, and would not wait, even one little minute, and it was vulgarly necessary, therefore, to have the wedding promptly at six.
After the wedding was over, I invited old Blobbs up to my den to smoke, and we compared notes on this occasion, and mutually arrived at this result: That the good old-fashioned custom of a large family wedding, celebrated in hospitable style, followed up with wit, sociality, games, and a dance, the guests departing at a seasonable time, well lined with capon and punch, trusting to Providence and instinct that the young couple would find their way through the night, somehow, to the breakfast table the next morning, the bride dressed in the rosiest of blushes, and the groom very plucky and defiant, each commencing the race in life from the starting point of home, was much more sensible than this modern custom of gathering together all their dear friends, hurrying through the ceremony, and then running off a thousand miles, as if the couple had done something they were ashamed of.
And then we compared the comfort of home with a sleeping car: your own snugly furnished and beautifully adorned room, cosy, quiet, dreamy and mysterious, with the vulgar, rattling, smoking, baby-crying, enjoyed-in-common, dirty-counterpaned, cindery, head-smashing, waked-up-every-hour bunks of the sleeping car; the breakfast of cream and honey and strawberries, fragrant Mocha and snowy rolls, with the dirt, dust, cinders, smoke, tough beefsteaks and mahogany coffee of a sleeping car.
"De gustibus non est disputandum," said I.
"Ditto," said Blobbs.
From early morn until dewy eve, the dressmakers, mantau-makers, milliners, hair-dressers and chambermaids had been laboring on Aurelia. They modelled her, shaped her, powdered her, painted her, twisted her, pulled her, laced her, unlaced her, fixed her, took her to pieces and put her together again, behind carefully locked doors, while that poor devil Peplum, in a seven-by-nine room, with a two-by-three looking glass, two brushes and a comb, went at himself with fear and trembling, and although he was more lavish than ever of Macassar and Day & Martin, and split three pairs of kids and looked very red in the face, still he looked like himself, which is more than I can say of Aurelia.