But the married life of Miriam and Harvey Freeman was characteristically American in its happiness. The representatives of the oldest and of the latest inhabitants of this continent, their union seemed to produce the flower of what was best in both. Their wedding is still remembered in that region, as being everything that a Southern Californian wedding should be; and the bride, as she stood at the altar, looked what she was,--one of those women who, more than anything else in this world, are fitted to bring back to earth the gentle splendors of the Garden of Eden. In her dark eyes, as she fixed them upon Freeman, there was a mystic light, telling of fathomless depths of tenderness and intelligence: it seemed to her husband that love had expanded and uplifted her; or perhaps that other spirit in her, which had battled with her own, had now become reconciled, and therefore yielded up whatever it had of good and noble to aggrandize the gentle victory of its conqueror. Somehow, somewhere, in Miriam’s nature, Semitzin lived; and, as a symbol of the peace and atonement that were the issue of her strange interior story, her husband preserves with reverence and affection the mysterious garment called the Golden Fleece. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Golden Fleece, by Julian Hawthorne