With joyaunce bring her and with jollitie.
Never had man more joyful day than this,
Whom heaven would heap with bliss.
Make feast, therefore, now all this livelong day,
This day for ever to me holy is.”
Spenser.
THE spring buds had expanded into summer flowers, May blossoms had developed into autumn fruits, and the corn-fields were nearly white unto the harvest, when the finishing touch was given to Nestleton Chapel, and the day came round when that much-admired sanctuary was to be publicly opened and solemnly consecrated to God. Great as was the stir and the enthusiasm when the corner-stone was laid, that event had to hide its diminished head in presence of this crowning ceremony. The top-stone was emphatically brought on with shouting, and on that day Nestleton, with the whole Kesterton Circuit as a boon companion, gave itself up to an ecstacy of godly dissipation. Nor will this be wondered at, when it is remembered that the programme of the opening ceremonies included so joyous and important an episode as the marriage of Philip Fuller and Lucy Blyth. The fact that this ceremony was to take place in a “Methodist conventicle,” as the new building was contemptuously called, an act which was just made legally possible, thinned the number of invited guests considerably, as well as did the fact of Philip’s plebeian choice of a bride from a blacksmith’s hearth-stone. Both he and his father could well afford to excuse the absence of all such pitiful slaves to an unreasonable conventionalism, which cared more for caste than character, and paid a grovelling homage at the shrine of Mrs. Grundy. Philip knew that he was about to gain a first-class prize in what, as things go, is too truly a “matrimonial lottery.” His father knew that he was about to welcome to Waverdale Hall a member of the higher aristocracy of goodness and virtue, compared with which, blue blood and a pedigree dating from the Norman Conquest were trivialities too insignificant for mention; as for a mere Plutocracy, whose merit consists in money and acres, the old squire, even before his moral change had come, would have looked down on it with disdain. Now, both his own and his son’s convictions chimed in with Tennyson’s sentiment,—
“Trust me, Clara Vere de Vere;
From yon blue heavens above us bent,