"Is the young man of respectable family?" "Yes." "Is he
respectable in himself?" "Yes." "Has he an estimable character?"
"Yes." "Why, then, my dear Sir Walter, make no opposition." The advice
was taken, and a happy married life ensued. Let ministers and officers
of the law decline officiating at clandestine marriages. When they are
asked to date a marriage certificate back, as we all are asked, let
them peremptorily decline to say that the ceremony was in November
instead of January, or decline to leave the date blank, lest others
fill out the record erroneously. Let a law be passed in all our
States, as it has already been in some of the States, making a license
from officers of the law necessary before we can unite couples, and
then make it necessary to publish beforehand in the newspapers, as it
used to be published in the New England churches, so that if there be
lawful objection it may be presented, not swinging the buoy on the
rocks after the ship has struck and gone to pieces.

And here it might be well for me to take all the romance out of an
escapade by quoting a dozen lines of Robert Pollock, the great Scotch
poet, where he describes the crazed victim of one of these escapades:

"... Yet had she many days
Of sorrow in the world, but never wept.
She lived on alms, and carried in her hand
Some withered stalks she gathered in the spring.
When any asked the cause she smiled, and said
They were her sisters, and would come and watch
Her grave when she was dead. She never spoke
Of her deceiver, father, mother, home,
Or child, or heaven, or hell, or God; but still
In lonely places walked, and ever gazed
Upon the withered stalks, and talked to them;
Till, wasted to the shadow of her youth,
With woe too wide to see beyond, she died."

UNDER THE LIGHT.

But now I turn on this subject an intenser light. We have fifteen
hundred lights in this church, and when by electric touch they are
kindled in the evening service it is almost startling. But this whole
subject of "Clandestine Marriages and Escapades" I put under a more
intense light than that. The headlight of a locomotive is terrible if
you stand near enough to catch the full glare of it. As it sweeps
around the "Horseshoe Curve" of the Alleghanies or along the edges of
the Sierra Nevadas, how far ahead, and how deep down, and how high up
it flashes, and there is instantaneous revelation of mountai