as the whole town knew, in a most disgusting manner--Mehronay sat chuckling in his corner, writing something which he put on the copy-hook before going out on his beat. It was headed A DAZZLING AFFAIR and it ran thus: "For some time we have realised that we have not been doing full justice to the weddings that occur in this town; we have been using a repressed and obsolete style which is painful to those who enter into the joyous spirit of such occasions, and last night's wedding in the family of the patrician Skinners we assigned to our gentlemanly and urbane Mr. J. Mortimer Montague, late of the publicity department of the world-famed Robinson Circus and Menagerie. The following graceful account from Mr. Montague's facile pen is the most accurate and satisfactory report of a nuptial event we have ever recorded in these columns." And thereafter followed this: "Last evening, just as the clock in the steeple struck nine, a vast concourse of the beauty and the chivalry of our splendid city, composing wealth beyond the dreams of the kings of India and forming a galaxy only excelled in splendour by the knightly company at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, assembled to witness the marriage of Miss May Skinner and Mr. John Fortesque. The great auditorium was a bower of smilax and chrysanthemums, bewildering, amazing, superb in its verdant labyrinth. As the clock was striking the hour, the ten-thousand-dollar pipe-organ filled the edifice with strains of most seductive, entrancing music, played by Miss Jane Brown, the only real left-handed organist in the civilised world. Then came the wedding party, magnificent, radiant, resplendent with the glittering jewels of the Orient, dazzling with gorgeousness, stupefying and miraculous in its revelation of beauty. There were six handsome ushers--count them--six, ten bridesmaids--ten--a bevy of real, live, flower-bearing fairies, captured at an immense outlay of time and money in far Caucasia. The bride's resplendent costume and surpassing beauty put the blush upon the Queen of Sheba, made Hebe's effulgence fade as the moon before the sun; and as the long courtly train of knights errant and ladies-in-waiting passed the populace, they presented a regal spectacle, never equalled since the proud Cleopatra sailed down the perfumed lotus-bearing Nile in her gilded pageant to meet Marc Antony, while all the world stood agape at the unheard-of triumph. "To describe the bride's costume beggars the English language; and human imagination falls faint and feeble before the Herculean task. From the everlasting stars she stole the glittering diamonds that decked her alabaster brow and hid them in the Stygian umbrage of her hair. From the fleecy, graceful cloud she snared the marvellous drapery that floated like a dream about her queenly figure, and from the Peri at Heaven's gate she captured the matchless grace that bore her like an enchanted wraith through the hymeneal scene.