bright-colored picture than anything real. But by what perversity of
taste had the artist represented his principal figure as so wrinkled
and decayed, while yet he had decked her out in the brightest splendor
of attire, as if the loveliest maiden had suddenly withered into age
and become a moral to the beautiful around her? On they went, however,
and had glittered along about a third of the aisle, when another
stroke of the bell seemed to fill the church with a visible gloom,
dimming and obscuring the bright-pageant till it shone forth again as
from a mist.

This time the party wavered, stopped and huddled closer together,
while a slight scream was heard from some of the ladies and a confused
whispering among the gentlemen. Thus tossing to and fro, they might
have been fancifully compared to a splendid bunch of flowers suddenly
shaken by a puff of wind which threatened to scatter the leaves of an
old brown, withered rose on the same stalk with two dewy buds, such
being the emblem of the widow between her fair young bridemaids. But
her heroism was admirable. She had started with an irrepressible
shudder, as if the stroke of the bell had fallen directly on her
heart; then, recovering herself, while her attendants were yet in
dismay, she took the lead and paced calmly up the aisle. The bell
continued to swing, strike and vibrate with the same doleful
regularity as when a corpse is on its way to the tomb.

"My young friends here have their nerves a little shaken," said the
widow, with a smile, to the clergyman at the altar. "But so many
weddings have been ushered in with the merriest peal of the bells, and
yet turned out unhappily, that I shall hope for better fortune under
such different auspices."