WEDDING GLOOM. “Death doesn’t wait for a man to have his laugh out.”--_Salt-miners saying._ IT is hard for people who have never seen places like Soot City to believe in natures like Emma Butte’s and August Jarlsen’s. In river cities the labouring population may be augmented daily with a load of tramps and paupers who can travel on the river about as cheaply as their own feet can take them. No travel is as cheap as river boating. River fares cost much less than shoes, and no other cities have the shifting masses that the river cities get. This is not the nature of an inland town whose mine or iron vein is booming. No one leaves it. What is usual with one man may become the common talk of his district, if he be an influence in it. The vice of a member of the town corporation is the sorrow of the county. The men have gained their livelihood at the hands of the town; they nurse their birthplace when its resource is threatened; they work for it. Even as they live by it they die for it. In feeling Jarlsen was an American; his ideals were American. He went to church soberly, had a bust of Lincoln on his mantel, eschewed labour unions, and gave away a third of the not too princely stipend awarded him by the Bentleys for his position of payman. For all that, when the native Swedes got very drunk of an evening and, congregating By the Bridge, swore in their high, unearthly voices, he would be much ashamed and wish and even urge them farther. For he too was born in Sweden, and said “y” for “j” even yet, if the men hurried him. His room was By the Bridge. His wont was to ask the better set, the more American labourers, to his room of an evening. He then, like King David, charmed them with a harp. He would sit in front of the stove on a packing-box covered with pinkish jute, and there play and sing strange, sweet songs about birds and lonely mountains, and kings’ daughters and sad forests, and immortality; for these are of the kinds of songs that come from the North. Jarlsen’s generosity was remarkable; for his countrymen are money-getters beyond any non-Semitic people. The knowledge of the value of money is born in them. There is a saying at the ore beds that testifies to this: “A Swede will go farther for a dollar than an Irishman will for a drink.” But when Jarlsen took Emma Butte, in the face of the whole town, the men of his acquaintance marvelled greatly. If he were the man whom Soot City loved, Emma was the woman who ruled it. She “had not the class” that her lover had. Coming into the city as a child, she had learned the less rough speech of the town labour and taken on herself the somewhat milder manners of the people she now saw. But she had never tried to make a place among them; she lived with her father, plying her odd trade--she was a barber--and making her oddest pennies in another way, as shall be presently set forth.