“Isn’t she an angel,” said little Alice Vokes, one of the white-kilted fairies who strewed the carpet pathway from gate to altar with flowers.
“Isn’t she a stunner,” said Tom Raspin, a chubby youth of ten who formed one of a Sunday-school detachment “on guard.”
My own opinion is that she was both, even with the addition of the adjectives “perfect” and “regular” which were tacked on by the respondents in their emphatic replies.
There! I beg to decline further penny-a-lining on this subject. Let my readers paint the picture themselves, and then get an artist in colour to touch it off, with special orders “not to spare the paint,” and thus they may arrive at a satisfactory idea of Lucy’s wedding. Mr. Clayton tied the “hymeneal knot,” and I am in a position to affirm that he was “assisted by”—nobody; that nonsensical innovation was then happily unknown. When the wedding party drove off to Waverdale Hall, amid the enthusiastic applause of no end of uninvited spectators, Adam Olliver turned to Farmer Houston, and said with a smile,—
“There, Maister! T’ pattern’s finished. God set t’ shuttle te wark i’ answer te wer’ prayers. Nestleton Chapil was in it, Squire Fuller was in it, Philip and Lucy’s weddin’ was in it. Noo it’s finished, bless the Lord, an’ a pratty pattern it is.”
The wedding breakfast was a grand business. The great dining-hall was “furnished with guests;” stately lackies with powdered hair and abnormal calves, got as usual into each other’s way, and looked innocently unconscious of all that was going on. The most rigid justice was measured out to the sumptuous viands waiting sepulture, and then, that time of test and trial, that running of the gauntlet, that shivering plunge amid broken ice, the speechifying time, came round. Lucy pierced the Brobdignagian Greco-Gothic edifice of a bride-cake gallantly and resolutely, as though she had a spite against it, an article she never possessed against anything or anybody; then Philip gripped the weapon and speedily put it to the sword, sending round its ice-and-sugar mailed morsels to the expectant guests. Then followed the various toasts customary on such occasions, connected with speeches which need not be reported: their gist and character may be well imagined. Mr. Mitchell was the last speaker. He could not begin with, “unaccustomed as I am to public speaking,” as is often the case, but he displayed a nervousness which nobody who had heard him hold forth in Piggy Morris’s malt-kiln would ever have given him credit for. For a minute or two he floundered, and no wonder, the surroundings were somewhat different from those in the Midden Harbour Chapel of Ease; but he happened to catch a suspicious smile on the face of one of Philip’s college friends, and at once he felt the gravity of the occasion. The honour of Methodism, of Lucy Blyth’s—I beg her pardon, Lucy Fuller’s—clerical connections, of Philip’s choice of a Church were at stake, so he pulled himself together, and planted his feet firmly en the ground, as though he was about to quote Sir Walter Scott,—
“Come one, come all! this rock shall fly
From its firm base as soon as I!”