of a village
wedding.

Undoubtedly the nicest way to get married is on the sly, and indeed it
is at present becoming quite fashionable. Many young couples of my
acquaintance, who have had no other reason for concealing the fact
beyond their own whim, have thus slipped off without saying a word to
anybody, and returned full-blown housekeepers, with "at home" days of
their own, and everything else like real married people,--for, as said
an old lady to me, "one can never be sure of married people nowadays
unless you have been at the wedding."

My friend George Muncaster, who does everything charmingly different
from any one else, hit upon one of the quaintest plans for his
marriage. It was simple, and some may say prosaic enough. His days
being spent at a great office in the city, he got leave of absence for
a couple of hours, met his wife, went with her to the registrar's,
returned to his office, worked the rest of the day as usual, and then
went to his new home to find his wife and dinner awaiting him,--all
just as it was going to be every night for so many happy years.
Prosaic, you say! Not your idea of poetry, perhaps, but, after a new
and growing fashion in poetry, truly poetic. George Muncaster's
marriage is a type of the new poetry, the poetry of essentials. The old
poetry, as exemplified in the old-fashioned marriage, is a poetry of
externals, and certainly it has the advantage of picturesqueness.

There is perhaps more to be said for it than that. Indeed, if I were
ever to get married, I am at a loss to know which way I should
choose,--George Muncaster's way or the old merry fashion, with the rice
and the old shoes and the orange-blossom. No doubt the old cheery
publicity is a little embarrassing to the two most concerned, and the
old marriage customs, the singing of the bride and bridegroom to their
nuptial couch, the frank jests, the country horse-play, must have
fretted the souls of many a lover before Shelley, who, it will be
remembered, resented the choral celebrations of his Scotch landlord and
friends by appearing at his bedroom door with a brace of pistols.

How like Shelley! The Scotch landlord meant well, we may be sure, and
a very small pinch of humour, or even mere ordinary humanity, as
distinct from humanitarianism, would have taken in the situation. Of
course Shelley's mind was full of the sanctity of the moment, and
indignant that "the hour for which the years did sigh" should thus be
br