within. And every one ran away
from her, frightened to see a strange woman in an antiquated
wedding-dress stand there bitterly weeping. She had but just left her
bridegroom to go for a moment into the garden, and in so short a time
guests and bridegroom had all vanished. She asked after her bridegroom,
and nobody knew him. At last she told her story to the folk around her.
A man said he had bought the house, and knew nothing at all of her
bridegroom or her parents. They took her to the parish priest. He
reached his church-books down, and there he found recorded that almost
two hundred years before, a certain bride on the wedding-day had
disappeared from her father's house. Burdened thus with two centuries of
life, she lingered on a few lonely years, and then sank into the grave;
and the good, simple villagers whisper that the strange gardener was no
other than the Lord Jesus, who thus provided for His humble child an
escape from a union which would have been the source of bitterest woe.
After this it is almost an anti-climax to refer to a Scottish tale in
which a bridegroom was similarly spirited away. As he was leaving the
church after the ceremony, a tall dark man met him and asked him to come
round to the back of the church, for he wanted to speak to him. When he
complied, the dark man asked him to be good enough to stand there until
a small piece of candle he held in his hand should burn out. He
good-humouredly complied. The candle took, as he thought, less than two
minutes to burn; and he then rushed off to overtake his friends. On his
way he saw a man cutting turf, and asked if it were long since the
wedding party had passed. The man replied that he did not know that any
wedding party had passed that way to-day, or for a long time. "Oh, there
was a marriage to-day," said the other, "and I am the bridegroom. I was
asked by a man to go with him to the back of the church, and I went. I
am now running to overtake the party." The turf-cutter, feeling that
this could not be, asked him what date he supposed that day was. The
bridegroom's answer was in fact two hundred years short of the real
date: he had passed two centuries in those two minutes which the bit of
candle took, as he thought, to burn. "I remember," said he who cut the
turf, "that my grandfather used to tell something of such a
disappearance of a bridegroom, a story which his grandfather told him as
a fact which happened when he was young." "Ah, well then, I a