We had been studying one family party after another as the seats filled around us, for the audience collected by families, when, with a little rustle and stir attending her progress, and a whispering behind her as she advanced, the Bride appeared, for she had arrived from Stockholm by our train. It was the first time any one had seen her since she started on the wedding-tour, and the bows and smiles she dealt out on every side were not to be numbered. Our pretty girl got one--they were school-friends--and the horrid boy another, which he barely answered with a solemn nod of his head, being as shy of her, apparently, in her blue silk and white cape, as his sister was of Mr. Davis. It was really a very pretty dress of the Bride's, and one that made our traveling costumes look uncommonly shabby: it was taken up behind in the approved style, and only needed a bustle to have been truly effective. Doubtless she had seen plenty of those articles in Stockholm, only her husband said, "I hope, dear, you will never put on one of those horrid things;" and she told him certainly not if he did not like them; but I think she found afterward she needed one for that blue dress, and sent for it at the first opportunity. The young husband was not got up for show, knowing very well that no one would mind him, but he looked beamingly happy; and if he was not in a dress-coat with a flower in his buttonhole, like the _habitués_ of the Comédie Française or the Italiens, he understood how they use an opera-glass there. The glass was a new acquisition that he had brought home with him, and after practicing with it at the Royal Theatre in the capital, he was fully prepared to stand up between the acts, with his arm behind him in a negligently graceful attitude, and study the balcony. His acquaintances there must have found it rather embarrassing, for it was not a usual thing in Carlstad to look at one's friends through an opera-glass: he was the only person who did it, and they probably all talked about it when they went home. We were so occupied with our surroundings that we hardly thought of the piece, though it was given with considerable spirit, if I remember rightly. The sailors were fine, jolly tars, and the Chinese ladies and gentlemen toddled about in flowered dressing-gowns and talked with their thumbs, as it would appear the inhabitants of the Celestial Empire usually do; but the house did not allow itself to be betrayed into unseemly enthusiasm. There was an involuntary laugh now and then, and once somebody said _bravo_, but as a general thing a discreet reticence prevailed, and the actors might have gone through the piece on their heads in an extravagant desire to elicit signs of approval: they would only have received a cool little round of applause when the curtain fell.