promise meant just a little more to us because it was not smothered in
pomp.

For a wedding-trip we visited the cliff dwellings in Walnut Canyon.
Here, hundreds of years ago, other newly married couples had set up
housekeeping and built their dreams into the walls that still tell the
world that we are but newcomers on this hemisphere.

The news of our marriage reached the Canyon ahead of us, and we found
our little cabin filled with our friends and their gifts. They spent a
merry evening with us and as we bade them goodnight we felt that such
friendship was beyond price indeed.

But after midnight! The great open spaces were literally filled with a
most terrifying and ungodly racket. I heard shrieks and shots, and tin
pans banging. Horrors! The cook was on another vanilla-extract
jamboree!! But--drums boomed and bugles blared. Ah, of course! The
Indians were on the warpath; I never entirely trusted those red devils.
I looked around for a means of defense, but the Chief told me not to be
alarmed--it was merely a "shivaree."

"Now, what might that be?" I inquired. I supposed he meant at least a
banshee, or at the very least an Irish wake! It was, however, nothing
more or less than our friends serenading us. They came inside, thirty
strong; the walls of the cabin fairly bulged. They played all sorts of
tricks on us, and just as they left someone dropped a handful of sulphur
on top of the stove. Naturally, we went outside with our visitors to
wish them "godspeed!"

"I'll never get married again; at least not in the land of the