Husband and Wife Ruined before Their “Crane is Hung.”—The Foolish and Ruinous Display at Weddings.—An Illustration Given.—How Wedding Presents Lead to Debt and Unhappiness.—Living Does not Need much Machinery.—Mistake of Copying after People of Large Wealth.—Wise Choice of Furniture.—The best Adornments for the Home.—The Trousseaux of our Foremothers.—The Need of Simplicity.—Artificialities That make a Veil between our Souls and God. “Be not vain, oh my soul, and suffer not the din of thy vanity to deafen the ears of thy heart.”—AUGUSTINE. “It is possible so to complicate the machinery of living that the very life itself is crushed among the wheels. We may wrap ourselves so in comfort until our breath is smothered in the folds. The man whose wants are few is the man most likely to be found carrying a light heart.”—W. R. HUNTINGTON. Many young married people are ruined before their “crane is hung.” Ruined through the false vanity engendered by the foolish display made in their attempt to follow the fashion in the preparations for the wedding, and their start in life. This could not be better illustrated than by an article in _The Ladies’ Home Journal_, which I quote in full. While this does not typify all grades of society, yet the same spirit of show and vanity permeates all. “A little woman who lives in one of the interminable rows of cheap, turreted, showy houses, came to me a few days ago, pale with anxiety. ‘Kitty,’ she said, ‘is going to be married to young Holt, who is a salesman in one of the department stores, and I’m sure I don’t know how we are to raise money for a wedding breakfast and a full choir.’ “Kitty’s father is also a salesman on thirty dollars a week, and there are four other girls. Oh, the scrimping and saving that have gone on in that house to turn out Kitty and her sisters fashionably clothed. The cheap cuts of meat, the rancid butter, the beds without blankets, the stoves without coal, and the unpaid creditors, scowling out of every shop in the neighborhood when the old man passes by. He toils six days every week, early and late without complaining, and his wife spends his wages for, as she thinks, the best interests of his girls. “‘White satin, even the sleaziest, has gone up to a frightful price,’ she moaned, ‘and I dare not count what the wedding breakfast will cost.’ “When I asked why there must be a wedding breakfast and a full choir, she said, that every bride in their set had had both this summer, and what would the Holts think if Kitty came creeping like a pauper into their family? ‘The Holts,’ she assured me, ‘are high-flyers. No indeed: there shall be nothing half cut in any way about Kitty’s wedding.’