When they entered the castle, Jonas and Cynthy were already standing up before the presiding elder, and he was about to begin.  Cynthy’s face showed her sense of the awfulness of marrying at a moment of such fearful expectation, or perhaps she was troubling herself for fear that so much happiness out of heaven was to be had only in the commission of a capital sin.  But, like most people whose consciences are stronger than their intellects, she found great consolation in taking refuge under the wing of ecclesiastical authority.  To be married by a presiding elder was the best thing in the world next to being married by a bishop.

Whatever fear of the swift-coming judgment others might have felt, the benignant old elder was at peace.  Common-sense, a clean conscience, and a child-like faith enlightened his countenance, and since he tried to be always ready, and since his meditations made the things of the other life ever present, his pulse would scarcely have quickened if he had felt sure that the archangel’s trump would sound in an hour.  He neither felt the subdued fear shown on the countenance of Cynthy Ann, nor the strong skeptical opposition of Andrew, whose face of late had grown almost into a sneer.

“Do you take this woman to be your lawful and wedded wife—­”

And before the elder could finish it, Jonas blurted out, “You’d better believe I do, my friend.”

And then when the old man smiled and finished his question down to, “so long as ye both shall live,” Jonas responded eagerly, “Tell death er the jedgment-day, long or short.”

And Cynthy Ann answered demurely out of her frightened but too happy heart, and the old man gave them his benediction in an apostolic fashion that removed Cynthy Ann’s scruples, and smoothed a little of the primness out of her face, so that she almost smiled when Jonas said, “Well! it’s done now, and it can’t be undone fer all the Goshorns in Christendom er creation!”

And then the old gentleman—­for he was a gentleman, though he had always been a backwoodsman—­spoke of the excitement, and said that it was best always to be ready—­to be ready to live, and then you would be ready for death or the judgment.  That very night the end might come, but it was not best to trouble one’s self about it.  And he smiled, and said that it was none of his business, God could manage the universe; it was for him to be found doing his duty as a faithful servant.  And then it would be just like stepping out of one door into another, whenever death or the judgment should come.

While the old man was getting ready to leave, Julia and August slipped away, fearing lest their absence should be discovered.  But the peacefulness of the old elder’s face had entered into their souls, and they wished that they too were solemnly pronounced man and wife, with so sweet a benediction upon their union.

“I do not feel much anxious about the day of judgment or the millennium,” said August, whose idiom was sometimes a little broken.  “When I was so near dying I felt satisfied to die after you had kissed my lips.  But now that it seems we have come upon the world’s last days, I wish I were married to you.  I do not know how things will be in the new heaven and the new earth.  But I should like you to be my wife there, or at least to have been my wife on earth, if only for one hour.”