A STRANGE WEDDING

My moralisings were cut short by my entering a village, and, it being about the hour of noon, finding myself in the thick of a village wedding.

Undoubtedly the nicest way to get married is on the sly, and indeed it is at present becoming quite fashionable.Many young couples of my acquaintance, who have had no other reason for concealing the fact beyond their own whim, have thus slipped off without saying a word to anybody, and returned full-blown housekeepers, with "at home" days of their own, and everything else like real married people,--for, as said an old lady to me, "one can never be sure of married people nowadays unless you have been at the wedding."My friend George Muncaster, who does everything charmingly different from any one else, hit upon one of the quaintest plans for his marriage.It was simple, and some may say prosaic enough.His days being spent at a great office in the city, he got leave of absence for a couple of hours, met his wife, went with her to the registrar's, returned to his office, worked the rest of the day as usual, and then went to his new home to find his wife and dinner awaiting him,--all just as it was going to be every night for so many happy years.Prosaic, you say! Not your idea of poetry, perhaps, but, after a new and growing fashion in poetry, truly poetic.George Muncaster's marriage is a type of the new poetry, the poetry of essentials.The old poetry, as exemplified in the old-fashioned marriage, is a poetry of externals, and certainly it has the advantage of picturesqueness.

There is perhaps more to be said for it than that.Indeed, if Iwere ever to get married, I am at a loss to know which way Ishould choose,--George Muncaster's way or the old merry fashion, with the rice and the old shoes and the orange-blossom.No doubt the old cheery publicity is a little embarrassing to the two most concerned, and the old marriage customs, the singing of the bride and bridegroom to their nuptial couch, the frank jests, the country horse-play, must have fretted the souls of many a lover before Shelley, who, it will be remembered, resented the choral celebrations of his Scotch landlord and friends by appearing at his bedroom door with a brace of pistols.

How like Shelley! The Scotch landlord meant well, we may be sure, and a very small pinch of humour, or even mere ordinary humanity, as distinct from humanitarianism, would have taken in the situation.Of course Shelley's mind was full of the sanctity of the moment, and indignant that "the hour for which the years did sigh" should thus be broken in upon by vulgar revelry; but while we may sympathise with his view, and admit to the full the sacredness, not to say the solemnity, of the marriage ceremony, yet it is to be hoped that it still retains a naturally mirthful side, of which such public merriment is but the crude expression.

With all its sweet and mystical significance, surely the prevailing feeling in the hearts of bride and bridegroom is, or should be, that of happiness,--happiness bubbling and dancing, all sunny ripples from heart to heart.

Surely they can spare a little of it, just one day's sight of it, to a less happy world,--a world long since married and done for, and with little happiness in it save the spectacle of other people's happiness.It is good for us to see happy people, good for the symbols of happiness to be carried high amidst us on occasion; for if they serve no other purpose, they inspire in us the hope that we too may some day be happy, or remind our discontented hearts that we have been.

If it were only for the sake of those quaint old women for whom life would be entirely robbed of interest were it not for other people's weddings and funerals, one feels the public ceremony of marriage a sort of public duty, the happiness tax, so to say, due to the somewhat impoverished revenues of public happiness.Other forms of happiness are taxed; why not marriage?