at could hold a tithe of its people, and that
was the Howling Wilderness. The plan had been to have the wedding under
the pines on the hill; but the wind came pitching down the mountain,
with frost and snow in his beard, that morning, and drove them to the
shelter.

What a place was that Howling Wilderness! It was battle-field,
prize-ring, dead-house, gambling-hell, court-house, chapel, every thing
by turns.

There they stood, side by side and hand in hand, before the crackling
fire, before the little Judge. The house was hot. It was crowded thick
as the men could stand. Tighter than sardines in a tin box, the men
stood there bare-headed with hardly room to breathe. The fat little
magistrate was terribly embarrassed. He had sent all the way across the
mountains by the last pack-train, by the last express, by the last man
who had dared the snows, but no pack-train, no express, nothing had
returned with the coveted, the so-much-needed marriage ceremony and
service, which he had resolved to read to the people, interspersed with
such remarks and moral observations as the case might require. Alas! the
form of the ceremony had not arrived. He had nothing of the kind to
guide him. He had never officiated in this way before. He had never
studied up in this branch.

Why should he have studied up in this line, when there was but one woman
in all his little world?

As the form had not arrived, he had nothing in the world but his moral
observations to use on this imposing occasion, and he was embarrassed as
a man had never been embarrassed before.

He stood there trying hard to begin. He could hear the men breathe. The
pretty little woman was troubled too. Her face was all the time held
down, her eyes drooped, and she did not look up--did not look right or
left or anywhere, but seemed to surrender herself to fate, to give
herself away. Her soul seemed elsewhere, as if she sat on a high bank
above all this, and was not of it or in it at all.

"Do you solemnly swear?"

The Judge had jerked himself together with an effort that made his
joints fairly rattle. He hoisted his right hand in the air as he said
this, and, having once broken ground, he went on--"Do you solemnly swear
to love, and honor, and obey?"

Poor Limber Tim, who had just room enough behind the Judge to turn over,
here became embarrassed through sympathy for the little red-faced
magistrate, and of course flopped over, and began to write his name and
the date,