The Doctor's performance of the marriage ceremony was famous--the town was full of people who would never let anybody but Dr. Gowdy marry them. To those who knew, Mr. Shears was nowhere. The Doctor's method was a wonderful blend of gravity and of intimacy; he made you feel that you were the one man and woman in the world--the world summed up, indeed, in a single pair--and that you were going through a ceremony just a shade more solemn than any other man or woman had ever gone through before. His voice would be shot through with little tremors that showed his sincerity and his individual interest--briefly, Jared and Melissa had no cause to regret Mr. Shears. The Doctor kissed the bride in hearty, fatherly fashion--Henrietta kissed her too--and refused the fee Jared offered him. "No," he said; "I've cost you too much already." Jared wrung the Doctor's hand, and wondered that any mere man could fill his heart with such a tremor and such a glow. "I'm going to see you again before you leave for the East?" asked the Doctor. "Well, I have two weeks, at three hundred a week, with the Gayety Theayter," said Jared. "I put the finishing-touches to a picture every night in full view of the audience, and frame it with my own hands." "Good-bye here, then," said the Doctor. XIV This was the turning of the tide for Dr. Gowdy. From this time on, things began to run his way once more. The ministerial body, at its next meeting, reconsidered its resolution of censure; surely their brother had been sorely tried. The threatened suit of Meyer, Van Horn, and Co. was quashed by the Doctor's own dauntless bearing. The _Hourglass_ agreed to open its columns to him, though but for a short synopsis and without remuneration--so that he had to go into his own pocket for the Foreign Missions. And finally, the students at the Academy refused to hear of his withdrawal as trustee. They met; they protested; they resolved; they clamoured. "We want our Gowdy back! we want our Gowdy back!"--such was their cry. Their cry was heard; they got their Gowdy back. When next he addressed them (it was only on Ephesian Antiquities--a safe subject) their cry was heard again--heard, possibly, in the interior of the next State. It was the proudest moment of the Doctor's public life. Jared Stiles's "Golden Autumn," handled and framed in his usual manner, and "valued at" ten thousand dollars--none of Jared's larger pieces now falls below that figure--will soon go trailing, exhibitionwise, through the halls of the Eastern seaboard. But it is an error to assert that the name of the painting was suggested by the Rev. William S. Gowdy. No; he still stubbornly ranges all this work, and indeed all similar work in any other field of art, under the generic name of the Squash. * * * * * THE END * * * * * End of Project Gutenberg's Under the Skylights, by Henry Blake Fuller