I have already said that of this wedding no word was in the papers. Kings Port by the war lost all material things, but not the others, among which precious privacy remains to her; and, O Kings Port, may you never lose your grasp of that treasure! May you never know the land where the reporter blooms, where if any joy or grief befall you, the public press rings your doorbell and demands the particulars, and if you deny it the particulars, it makes them up and says something scurrilous about you into the bargain. Therefore nothing was printed, morning or evening, about John and Eliza. Nor was the wedding service held in church to the accompaniment of nodding bonnets and gaping stragglers. No eye not tender with regard and emotion looked on while John took Eliza to his wedded wife, to live together after God’s ordinance in the holy state of matrimony. In Royal Street, not many steps from South Place, there stands a quiet house a little back, upon whose face sorrow has struck many blows, but made no deep wounds yet; no scorch from the fires of war is visible, and the rending of the earthquake does not show too plainly; but there hangs about the house a gravity that comes from seeing and suffering much, and a sweetness from having sheltered many generations of smiles and tears. The long linked chain of births and deaths here has not been broken and scattered, and the grandchildren look out of the same windows from which the grandsires gazed, whose faces now in picture frames still watch serenely the sad present from their happy past. Therefore the rooms lie in still depths of association, and from the walls, the stairs, the furniture, flows the benign influence of undispersed memories; it sheds its tempered radiance upon the old miniatures, and upon every fresh flower that comes in from the garden; it seems to pass through the open doors to and fro like a tranquil blessing; it is beyond joy and pain, because time has distilled it from both of these; it is the assembled essence of kinship and blood unity, enriched by each succeeding brood that is born, is married, is fruitful in its turn, and dies remembered; only the balm of faith is stronger to sustain and heal; for that comes from heaven, while it is earth that gives us this; and the sacred cup of it which our native land once held is almost empty. Amid this influence John and Eliza were made one, and the faces of the older generations grew soft beneath it, and pensive eyes became lustrous, and into pale cheeks the rosy tint came like an echo faintly back for a short hour. They made so little sound in their quiet happiness of congratulation that it might have been a dream; and they were so few that the house with the sense of its memories was not lost with the movement and crowding, but seemed still to preside over the whole, and send down its benediction. When it was my turn to shake the hands of bride and groom, John asked:-- “What did your friend do with your advice?”