"A Papist,—a Catholic!"
"Ah!" he returned, sighing, "once I was bon Catholique,—once in my gone youth; after then I was nothing but the poor man who bats for his life; now I am of the religion that shelters the stranger and binds up the broken poor."
Monsieur was a diplomatist. This melted Miss Lucinda's orthodoxy right down; she only said,—
"Then you will go to church with me?"
"And to the skies above, I pray," said Monsieur, kissing her knotty hand like a lover.
So in the earliest autumn they were married, Monsieur having previously presented Miss Lucinda with a delicate plaided gray silk for her wedding attire, in which she looked almost young; and old Israel was present at the ceremony, which was briefly performed by Parson Hyde in Miss Manners's parlor. They did not go to Niagara, nor to Newport; but that afternoon Monsieur Leclerc brought a hired rockaway to the door, and took his bride a drive into the country. They stopped beside a pair of bars, where Monsieur hitched his horse, and, taking Lucinda by the hand, led her into Farmer Steele's orchard, to the foot of his biggest apple-tree. There she beheld a little mound, at the head and foot of which stood a daily rose-bush shedding its latest wreaths of bloom, and upon the mound itself was laid a board on which she read,
"Here lie the bones of poor Piggy."
Mrs. Lucinda burst into tears, and Monsieur, picking a bud from the bush, placed it in her hand, and led her tenderly back to the rockaway.
That evening Mrs. Lucinda was telling the affair to old Israel with so much feeling that she did not perceive at all the odd commotion in his face, till, as she repeated the epitaph to him, he burst out with,—"He didn't say what become o' the flesh, did he?"—and therewith fled through the kitchen-door. For years afterward Israel would entertain a few favored auditors with his opinion of the matter, screaming till the tears rolled down his cheeks,—
"That was the beateree of all the weddin'-towers I ever heerd tell on.
Goodness! it's enough to make the Wanderin' Jew die o' larfin'!"