Mrs. Hoover used to say that he hardly spoke to her on the trip.  Sat around in a daze, scowling and rolling his eyes, or charged up and down the deck, swinging his arms and muttering to himself.  Scared her half to death, and she spent all her time crying when he wasn’t around.  Thought he didn’t love her any more, and it wasn’t till the first Sunday after she got home that she discovered what had ailed him.  Seemed that in the exaltation produced by his happiness at having got her, he’d been composing a masterpiece, his famous sermon on the Horrors of Hell, that scared half of Pike County into the fold, and popularized dominoes with penny points as a substitute for dollar-limit draw-poker among those whom it didn’t quite fetch.

Curious old cuss, the Doc.  Found his wife played the piano pretty medium rotten, so when he wanted to work himself into a rage about something he’d sit down in the parlor and make her pound out “The Maiden’s Prayer.”

It’s a mighty lucky thing that the Lord, and not the neighbors, makes the matches, because Doc’s friends would have married him to Deacon Dody’s daughter, who was so chuck full of good works that there was no room inside her for a heart.  She afterward eloped with a St. Louis drummer, and before he divorced her she’d become the best lady poker player in the State of Missouri.  But with Leila and the Doc it was a case of give-and-take from the start—­that is, as is usual with a good many married folks, she’d give and he’d take.  There never was a better minister’s wife, and when you’ve said that you’ve said the last word about good wives and begun talking about martyrs, because after a minister’s wife has pleased her husband she’s got to please the rest of the church.

I simply mention Doc’s honeymoon in passing as an example of the fact that two people can start out in life without anything in common apparently, except a desire to make each other happy, and, with that as a platform to meet on, keep coming closer and closer together until they find that they have everything in common.  It isn’t always the case, of course, but then it’s happened pretty often that before I entered the room where an engaged couple were sitting I’ve had to cough or whistle to give them a chance to break away; and that after they were married I’ve had to keep right on coughing or whistling for the same couple to give them time to stop quarreling.

There are mighty few young people who go into marriage with any real idea of what it means.  They get their notion of it from among the clouds where they live while they are engaged, and, naturally, about all they find up there is wind and moonshine; or from novels, which always end just before the real trouble begins, or if they keep on, leave out the chapters that tell how the husband finds the rent and the wife the hired girls.  But if there’s one thing in the world about which it’s possible to get all the facts, it’s matrimony.  Part of them are right in the house where you were born, and the neighbors have the rest.