upon every fresh flower that comes in from the garden;
it seems to pass through the open doors to and fro
like a tranquil blessing; it is beyond joy and pain,
because time has distilled it from both of these; it
is the assembled essence of kinship and blood unity,
enriched by each succeeding brood that is born, is
married, is fruitful in its turn, and dies remembered;
only the balm of faith is stronger to sustain and heal;
for that comes from heaven, while it is earth that
gives us this; and the sacred cup of it which our
native land once held is almost empty.
Amid this influence John and Eliza were made one,
and the faces of the older generations grew soft beneath
it, and pensive eyes became lustrous, and into pale
cheeks the rosy tint came like an echo faintly back
for a short hour. They made so little sound in
their quiet happiness of congratulation that it might
have been a dream; and they were so few that the house
with the sense of its memories was not lost with the
movement and crowding, but seemed still to preside
over the whole, and send down its benediction.
When it was my turn to shake the hands of bride and
groom, John asked:—
“What did your friend do with your advice?”
And I replied. “He has taken it.”
“Perhaps not that,” John returned, “but
you must have helped him to see his way.”
When the bride came to cut the cake, she called me
to her and fulfilled her promise.
“You have always liked my baking,” she
said.
“Then you made it after all,” I answered.
“I would not have been married without doing
so,” she declared sweetly.
When the time came for them to go away, they were
surrounded with affectionate God-speeds; but Miss
Josephine St. Michael waited to be the last, standing
a little apart, her severe and chiselled face turned
aside, and seeming to watch a mocking-bird that was
perched in his cage at a window halfway up the stairs.
“He is usually not so silent,” Miss Josephine
said to me. “I suppose we are too many
visitors for him.”
Then I saw that the old lady, beneath her severity,
was deeply moved; and almost at once John and Eliza
came down the stairs. Miss Josephine took each
of them to her heart, but she did not trust herself
to speak; and a single tear rolled down her face,
as the boy and girl continued to the hall-door.
There Daddy Ben stood, and John’s gay good-by
to him was the last word that I heard the bridegroom
say. While we all stood silently watching them
as they drove away from the tall iron gate, the mocking-bird
on the staircase broke into melodious ripples of song.
And now here goes my language back into the small-clothes
that it wore at the beginning of all, when I told
you something of that colonial society, the Selected
Salic Scions, dear to the heart of my Aunt. It
were beyond my compass to approach this august body
of men and women with the respect that is its due,
did I attire myself in that modern garment which, in
the phrase of the vulgar, is denoted pants.
