While the clerk was picking out a couple of rooms that were near together, the man looked around at the colored man who had the satchel, and as the clerk said, “Show the gentleman to No 65 and the lady to 67,” he said, “Hold on, ’squire!  One room will do.”

On being shown to the room, the bridegroom came right out with the bell boy and appeared at the office.  Picking out a benevolent looking gentleman, with a good place to raise hair on his head, who was behind the counter, the groom said: 

“Say, can a man enjoy religion in this house?”

Mr. White said a man could if he brought it with him.  They had none on hand to issue out to guests, but they never interfered with those who had it when they arrived.

“Why,” says the manager of the house, “has anybody interfered with your devotions here?”

“No, not here,” said the man, wiping his forehead with a red handkerchief.  “But they have at Dubuque.  I’ll tell you how it was.  I was married a couple of days ago, and night before last I put up at a Dubuque hotel.  My wife never had been married before any at all, and she is timid, and thinks everybody is watching us, and making fun of us!  She jumps at the slightest sound.

“Well, we went to our room in the afternoon, and she began to cry, and said if she wasn’t married she never would be the longest day she lived.  I sort of put my arm around her, and was just telling her that everybody had to get married, when there was a knock on the door, and she jumped more than thirty feet.

“You see that finger.  Well, a pin in her belt stuck clear through, and came near making me faint away.  I held my finger in my mouth, and telling her the house was not on fire, I went to the door and there was a porter there who wanted to know if I wanted any more coal on the fire.  I drove him away, and sat down in a big rocking chair with my wife in my lap, and was stroking her hair and telling her that if she would forgive me for marrying I never would do so again, and trying to make her feel more at home, when there came another knock at the door, and she jumped clear across the room and knocked over a water pitcher.

“This seal ring on my finger caught in her frizzes and I’ll be cussed if the whole top of her head didn’t come off.  I was a little flurried and went to the door, and a chambermaid was there with an armful of towels and she handed me a couple and went off.  My wife came into camp again, and began to cry and accuse me of pulling her hair, when I went up to her and put my arm around her waist, and was just going to kiss her, just as any man would be justified in kissing his wife under the circumstances, when she screamed murder and fell against the bureau.

“I looked around and the door had opened, and there was a colored man coming into the room with a kerosene lamp, and he chuckled and said he begged my pardon.  Now, I am a man that don’t let my temper get away with me, but as it was three hours before dark I didn’t see what was the use of a lamp, and I told him to get out of there.  Before 6 o’clock that evening there had been twenty raps at the door, and we got sick.  My wife said she would not stay in that house for a million dollars.  So we started for Milwaukee.