“Did you, dear?”

“Indeed, I did.  I made him the April fool!  And I told him so, too!  Ah, it was a charming surprise!  There he stood, sweltering in a black dress-suit, with the mercury leaking out of the top of the thermometer, waiting to be married.  You should have seen the look he gave when I whispered it in his ear.  Ah, his wickedness cost me many a heartache and many a tear, but the score was all squared up, then.  So the vengeful feeling went right out of my heart, and I begged him to stay, and said I forgave him everything.  But he wouldn’t.  He said he would live to be avenged; said he would make our lives a curse to us.  But he can’t, can he, dear?”

“Never in this world, my Rosannah!”

Aunt Susan, the Oregonian grandmother, and the young couple and their Eastport parents, are all happy at this writing, and likely to remain so.  Aunt Susan brought the bride from the islands, accompanied her across our continent, and had the happiness of witnessing the rapturous meeting between an adoring husband and wife who had never seen each other until that moment.

A word about the wretched Burley, whose wicked machinations came so near wrecking the hearts and lives of our poor young friends, will be sufficient.  In a murderous attempt to seize a crippled and helpless artisan who he fancied had done him some small offense, he fell into a caldron of boiling oil and expired before he could be extinguished.

ON THE DECAY OF THE ART OF LYING

Essay, for discussion, read at A meeting of the historical and antiquarian club of Hartford, and offered for the thirty-dollar prize.  Now first published.—­[Did not take the prize]

Observe, I do not mean to suggest that the custom of lying has suffered any decay or interruption—­no, for the Lie, as a Virtue, a Principle, is eternal; the Lie, as a recreation, a solace, a refuge in time of need, the fourth Grace, the tenth Muse, man’s best and surest friend, is immortal, and cannot perish from the earth while this Club remains.  My complaint simply concerns the decay of the art of lying.  No high-minded man, no man of right feeling, can contemplate the lumbering and slovenly lying of the present day without grieving to see a noble art so prostituted.  In this veteran presence I naturally enter upon this scheme with diffidence; it is like an old maid trying to teach nursery matters to the mothers in Israel.  It would not become me to criticize you, gentlemen, who are nearly all my elders—­and my superiors, in this thing —­and so, if I should here and there seem to do it, I trust it will in most cases be more in a spirit of admiration than of fault-finding; indeed, if this finest of the fine arts had everywhere received the attention, encouragement, and conscientious practice and development which this Club has devoted to it I should not need to utter this lament or shed a single tear.  I do not say this to flatter:  I say it in a spirit of just and appreciative recognition.