A WEDDING IN MUSKOKA.
I freely acknowledge that I am a romantic old woman; my children are continually telling me that such is my character, and without shame I confess the soft impeachment. I do not look upon romance as being either frivolous, unreal, or degrading; I consider it as a heaven-sent gift to the favoured few, enabling them to cast a softening halo of hope and beauty round the stern and rugged realities of daily life, and fitting them also to enter into the warm feelings and projects of the young, long after the dreams of love and youth have become to themselves things of the past. After this exordium, I need hardly say that I love and am loved by young people, that I have been the depositary of many innocent love secrets, and have brought more than one affair of the kind to a happy conclusion. I feel tempted to record my last experience, which began in France and ended happily in Muskoka. The parties, I am happy to say, are still living, to be, I doubt not, greatly amused at my faithful reminiscences of their past trials.
Just seven years ago I was in France busily working in my beautiful flower-garden, when I was told that visitors awaited me in the drawing-room. Hastily pulling off my garden-gloves and apron, I went in and found a very dear young friend, whom I shall call John Herbert; he asked my permission to present to me four young ladies of his acquaintance, all sisters, and very sweet specimens of pretty, lady-like English girls. The eldest, much older than the rest, and herself singularly attractive, seemed completely to merge her own identity in that of her young charges, to whose education she had devoted the best years of her early womanhood, and who now repaid her with loving affection and implicit deference to her authority. It was easy for me to see that the “bright, particular star” of my handsome, dashing young friend was the second sister, a lovely, shy girl of sixteen, whose blushes and timidity fully assured me of the state of matters between the two.
The mother of Mary Lennox (such was my heroine’s name) lived in France, her father in England, and in this divided household the care of the three younger girls had been entirely left to their eldest sister. John Herbert had made their acquaintance in that extraordinary manner in which young ladies and gentlemen do manage to become acquainted, as often in real life as in novels, without any intercourse between the respective families. For two or three months he had been much in their society, and the well-known result had followed. I have rarely seen a handsomer couple than these boy and girl lovers, on whom the eldest sister evidently looked with fond and proud admiration; and when, after a protracted visit, they took leave of me, I felt fully disposed to treat them with the warmest kindness and friendship.