I was told later of this friend’s innocent boast of conversion to free thought and of Joe’s quick reply: “Why, then, you’ll have plenty of time to think.” But this sterner remark was not in his usual vein, and much oftener I think he pleased his two friends by his immediate sympathy with free foreign manners, most especially those of the French, who always had the first place in his affections as contrasted with “bulgy-necked Germans whose poverty-stricken tongue” forced them to call a thimble a “finger hat” and a glove a “hand-shoe,” and decreed that three men must order their baths as “drei.” I must add in his defence that he never could speak or read the language; it was his mother wit that pulled him through difficulties. Once when alone in Dresden he was driven to ask his way in the words of a well-known song and, even at that time, was probably set down as an insolent Englishman for the intimate pronoun in his “Kennst du das Sidonien Strasse”? What treatment would he receive now and how would he take it? But his two friends were German scholars and good cicerones, and led him safely to the Hotel de Saxe on the morning of December 15th, 1873, where my father married us in the presence of a newly arrived British ambassador. There was some obvious raillery, to which Joe nimbly responded, in consequence of that pleni-potentiary remarking, with grim humour, that he wondered if these marriages were really valid; but the gentleman took the best precautions available in requiring the legal part of the ceremony to take place on the “British ground” of his small, temporary hotel room, and there, both of us kneeling on two little sofa cushions, the ring was put upon my finger. My father, however, naturally wanted to “finish us off” in the English Church, and I remember my shyness when I saw the uninvited crowd which had assembled there--I was told afterwards to see what a high-art wedding dress would be like! Joe declared that they expected it to be scanty; if so they must have been disappointed that the folds of my soft brocade, fashioned after my artist sister-in-law’s design and approved by my husband, were much more ample than was the mode of the day. How much have we changed since the Morris vogue! I don’t think I minded then being the centre of observation, even though I may have guessed it was fraught with adverse criticism--not wholly, as I now think, undeserved. But in the friendly little party that assembled in our modest home to wish us God-speed there was no adverse criticism, and we went off to Leipzig for our honeymoon _en route_ for England and work, without any of the fatiguing excitement of a society assembly. Joe’s graceful little speech in reply to congratulations was quite the merriest note of the simple festivities.