“In like manner, looking to your Heavenly Father for his blessing, you ... do now receive this man, whose hand you hold, to be your lawfully wedded husband.  You choose him from all the world as he has chosen you.  You pledge your trust to him as your best earthly friend.  You promise to love, to comfort, and to honor him; to cultivate for his sake all womanly graces; to guard his reputation, and assist him in his life’s work; and in all things to esteem his happiness as your own.  You give yourself thus trustfully to him, to be his wife in good faith, so long as the providence of God shall spare you to each other.”

When Harrie lifted her shining eyes to say, “I do!” the two little happy words ran through the silent room like a silver bell; they would have tinkled in your ears for weeks to come if you had heard them.

I have been thus particular in noting the words of the service, partly because they pleased me, partly because I have since had some occasion to recall them, and partly because I remember having wondered, at the time, how many married men and women of your and my acquaintance, if honestly subjecting their union to the test and full interpretation and remotest bearing of such vows as these, could live in the sight of God and man as “lawfully wedded” husband and wife.

Weddings are always very sad things to me; as much sadder than burials as the beginning of life should be sadder than the end of it.  The readiness with which young girls will flit out of a tried, proved, happy home into the sole care and keeping of a man whom they have known three months, six, twelve, I do not profess to understand.  Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is high, I cannot attain unto it.  But that may be because I am fifty-five, an old maid, and have spent twenty years in boarding-houses.

A woman reads the graces of a man at sight.  His faults she cannot thoroughly detect till she has been for years his wife.  And his faults are so much more serious a matter to her than hers to him!

I was thinking of this the day before the wedding.  I had stepped in from the kitchen to ask Mrs. Bird about the salad, when I came abruptly, at the door of the sitting-room, upon as choice a picture as one is likely to see.

The doors were open through the house, and the wind swept in and out.  A scarlet woodbine swung lazily back and forth beyond the window.  Dimples of light burned through it, dotting the carpet and the black-and-white marbled oilcloth of the hall.  Beyond, in the little front parlor, framed in by the series of doorways, was Harrie, all in a cloud of white.  It floated about her with an idle, wavelike motion.  She had a veil like fretted pearls through which her tinted arm shone faintly, and the shadow of a single scarlet leaf trembled through a curtain upon her forehead.

Her mother, crying a little, as mothers will cry the day before the wedding, was smoothing with tender touch a tiny crease upon the cloud; a bridesmaid or two sat chattering on the floor; gloves, and favors, and flowers, and bits of lace like hoar frost, lay scattered about; and the whole was repictured and reflected and reshaded in the great old-fashioned mirrors before which Harrie turned herself about.