“How different, how different Josiah Allen and I look at things!  And still we worship each other, jest about.”

Wall, Thomas Jefferson and Maggie wuz there, and Tirzah Ann and Whitfield, and the children, and Krit.  The two girls, our daughters, wuz dressed in white, and the Babe stood up by the bride dressed in white, and holdin’ a cunnin’ little basket of posies in her hand, and they all looked pretty, and felt pretty, and acted so.

We had good refreshments to refresh ourselves with, and everything went off happy and joyous, as weddings should, and will, if True Love stands up with ’em; and she is the only Bridesmaid worth a cent.

(I am aware that it is usual to call Love a he, but I believe in fair play, and you may as well call it a she once in a while, specially as the female sect are as lovin’ agin as the he ones, so I think.)

Wall, they had lots and lots of presents—­nice ones too.  Mr. Freeman’s gift to her wuz two diamond and ruby bracelets, that shone on her white wrists like sparks of fire and dew.

Them diamonds seemed to be the mates of the ones that had burned on her finger ever sence a day or two after they met at the World’s Fair.

So you see, though she gin her jewels away in her youth, she found ’em agin in her ripe, sweet womanhood.  She gin away the jewels of her ambition, her glowin’ hopes and desires, for a career, and she found ’em more than all made up to her.

But the jewels her husband prized most in her wuz the calm light of patience, and love, and womanliness that shone on her face.  They wuz made, them pure pearls of hern, as pearls always are, by long sufferin’ and endurance, and the “constant anguish of patience.”

Krit give her for his gift a beautiful cross of precious stones, and I mistrusted, from what I see in her face when he gin it to her, that he meant it to be symbolical, and then agin I don’t know.  But, anyway, she wore it a-fastenin’ the lace at her white throat.

[Illustration:  Krit give her a beautiful cross.]

But I do know that the girls and I gin her some good linen napkins, and towels, and table-cloths, and the boys a handsome set of books.

And I do know that the supper afterwards wuz, although well I know the impoliteness of my even hintin’ at it—­I do know, and I should lie if I said that I didn’t know it, that that supper wuz a good one—­as good a one, so fur as my knowledge goes, as wuz ever put on a table in the town of Lyme, or the village of Jonesville.

And Josiah Allen, he eat too much—­fur, fur too much.  And I hunched him three times to that effect at the time, to no avail.

And once I stepped on his toe—­a dretful warnin’ steppin’—­and he asked me out loud and snappish (I hit a corn, I spoze, onbeknown to me)—­and he asked me right out before ’em all, voyalent, “What I wuz a-steppin’ on his toe for?”

[Illustration:  I stepped on his toe.]