Although neither Cynthia nor I was greatly inconvenienced by this crude statement of the case, except in the matter of the smiles we strove in vain to control, the parson, good, honest man, was not a little disconcerted by it. "Tut, tut!" says he, "my good Blodgett, your tongue runs too fast. However excellent the motives may be that inspire you, I could wish you had a somewhat less direct manner of expressing them. I really cannot have you intervene between plighted lovers, at the very steps of the altar. And whatever the personality of our young lady, if truth compels us to admit that our young gentleman is scarcely so fortunate in his physical semblance, I am sure he hath a very nice mind." With these panegyrics we ultimately got us to church. Now it is not to be expected, I hope, that a man should describe his own nuptials. If there are three acts in his life on which he is the least qualified to speak, are not those his birth, his marriage, and his burial? For in not one of them can he testify with any certainty as to whether he went through them on his heels or his head. Besides, I am one who holds that there should be a becoming reticence in these things. I can recall perhaps an empty, musty-smelling church, and the clerk, a solemn, unctuous man, with a graveyard cough. Some little wind of the affair had evidently got abroad in the village, owing to the exertions of Mrs. Blodgett in quest of the wedding-ring. Thus the ceremony was not so entirely private as we could have wished. A few women in aprons, and some with babes in their arms kept the porch and the immediate interior of the church. It seemed that they did not venture to go further owing to their awe of the clerk. Various ragamuffin children of tender years played hide-and-seek round the gravestones and their mothers' gowns. When however the wedding party came along in a kind of little procession, they desisted for a minute, and having safely seen the parson precede us into the sacred edifice, they put out their tongues at Cynthia and myself, and made several references of a nature uncomplimentary to us couched in the form of rustic wit. Mrs. Blodgett had undertaken the office of chief bridesmaid. She would have undertaken that of groomsman too, had I given her the least encouragement. She made an impressive figure at the altar rails, clad in a severe black hood; whilst she was quite conscious of her conspicuous position, and stood calm and erect in the dignity of her infinite experience. What whispered but animated counsel she proffered to Cynthia during the brief period in which we waited for the parson to emerge from the vestry, I know not, but I would have given a good deal to have been a party to it, for I am sure that if the look on Mrs. Cynthia's countenance was any index to its character, it would well have been worth setting down in this place.