_Mr. Fax._ The history of common life seems as circumscribed as its moral attributes: for the most extensive information I can collect from these gravestones is, that the parties married, lived in trouble, and died of a conflict between a disease and a physician. I observe a last request, which I suppose was very speedily complied with—that of a tender husband to his loving wife not to weep for him long. If it be as you say, that the faults of the dead are soon forgotten, yet the memory of their virtues is not much longer lived; and I have often thought that these words of Rabelais would furnish an appropriate inscription for ninety-nine gravestones out of every hundred:—_Sa mémoire expira avecque le son des cloches qui carillonèrent à son enterrement._ CHAPTER XXXV THE RUSTIC WEDDING The bride and bridegroom, with half a dozen of their friends, now entered the churchyard. The bride, a strong, healthy-looking country girl, was clinging to the arm of her lover, not with the light and scarcely perceptible touch with which Miss Simper complies with the request of Mr. Giggle, ‘that she will do him the honour to take his arm,’ but with a cordial and unsophisticated pressure that would have made such an arm as Mr. Giggle’s black and blue. The bridegroom, with a pair of chubby cheeks, which in colour precisely rivalled his new scarlet waistcoat, and his mouth expanded into a broad grin that exhibited the total range of his teeth, advanced in a sort of step that was half a walk and half a dance, as if the preconceived notion of the requisite solemnity of demeanour were struggling with the natural impulses of the overflowing joy of his heart. Mr. Fax looked with great commiseration on this bridal pair, and determined to ascertain if they had a clear notion of the evils that awaited them in consequence of the rash step they were about to take. He therefore accosted them with an observation that the Reverend Mr. Portpipe was not at leisure, but would be in a few minutes. ‘In the meantime,’ said he, ‘I stand here as the representative of general reason, to ask if you have duly weighed the consequences of your present proceeding.’ _The Bridegroom._ General Reason! I be’s no soger man, and bean’t countable to no General whatzomecomedever. We bean’t under martial law, be we? Voine times indeed if General Reason be to interpose between a poor man and his sweetheart. _Mr. Fax._ That is precisely the case which calls most loudly for such an interposition. _The Bridegroom._ If General Reason waits till I or Zukey calls loudly vor’n, he’ll wait long enough. Woan’t he, Zukey? _The Bride._ Ees, zure, Robin. _Mr. Fax._ General reason, my friend, I assure you, has nothing to do with martial law, nor with any other mode of arbitrary power, but with authority that has truth for its foundation, benevolence for its end, and the whole universe for its sphere of action.