"Yes, this is my beautiful bride. [My aunt was now about sixty years old.] Well do I recall the evening of her marriage. I was to be her bridesmaid, you know, and when the time came, I was all dressed and ready. But the Dorchester coach was wanted for old Madam Blake's funeral, and as there was no other conveyance to be had, I was obliged to wait for it. The time seemed endless while I was walking up and down the hall in my bridesmaid's dress, my mother from time to time exhorting me to have patience, without much effect. "At last the coach came, and in it I was driven to your grandmother's house in Jamaica Plain. As I entered the door I met the bridal party coming downstairs. Your mother said to me, 'Oh! Elizabeth, we thought you were not coming.' After this all passed off pleasantly. Your grandmother was dressed in a lilac silk gown of rather antiquated fashion, adorned with frills and furbelows which had passed out of date. Your mother, who had come on from New York for the ceremony, said to her later in the evening, 'Dear mamma, you must make a present of that gown to some theatrical friend. It is only fit for the boards.'" The officiating clergyman of the occasion was the Reverend Benjamin Clarke Cutler, brother of the bride. It was his first service of the kind, and the company were somewhat amused when, in absence or confusion of mind, he pronounced the nuptial blessing upon _M_ and _N_, the letters which stand in the church ritual for the names of the parties contracting. Accordingly, at the wedding supper, the first toast was drunk "to the health and happiness of M and N," and responded to with much merriment. I have further been told that the bride's elder sister, afterwards known as Mrs. Francis, danced "in stocking-feet" with my father's elder brother, this having been the ancient rule when the younger children were married before the older ones. In spite of the costume which met with her daughter's disapproval, my maternal grandmother was not indifferent to dress. She used to lament the ugliness of modern fashions, and to extol those of her youth, in which she was one of the _élégantes_ of Southern society. She remembered with pleasure that General Washington once crossed a ball-room to speak with her. This was probably when she was the wife or widow of Colonel Herne, to whom she was married at the age of fourteen (when her dolls, she told me, were taken away from her), and whose death occurred before she had attained legal majority. She had received a good musical education for those times, and Colonel Perkins of Boston once told me that he remembered her as a fascinating young widow with a lovely voice. It must have been during her visit to Boston that she met my grandfather Cutler, who straightway fell in love with and married her. When past her sixtieth year she would sometimes sing an old-time duet with my father. She had a great love of good literature. Here is what she told me about the fashions of her youth: