My moralisings were cut short by my entering a village, and, it
being about the hour of noon, finding myself in the thick of a
village wedding.

Undoubtedly the nicest way to get married is on the sly, and
indeed it is at present becoming quite fashionable. Many young
couples of my acquaintance, who have had no other reason for
concealing the fact beyond their own whim, have thus slipped off
without saying a word to anybody, and returned full-blown
housekeepers, with "at home" days of their own, and everything
else like real married people,--for, as said an old lady to me,
"one can never be sure of married people nowadays unless you
have been at the wedding."

My friend George Muncaster, who does everything charmingly
different from any one else, hit upon one of the quaintest plans
for his marriage. It was simple, and some may say prosaic
enough. His days being spent at a great office in the city, he
got leave of absence for a couple of hours, met his wife, went
with her to the registrar's, returned to his office, worked the
rest of the day as usual, and then went to his new home to find
his wife and dinner awaiting him,--all just as it was going to
be every night for so many happy years. Prosaic, you say! Not
your idea of poetry, perhaps, but, after a new and growing
fashion in poetry, truly poetic. George Muncaster's marriage is
a type of the new poetry, the poetry of essentials. The old
poetry, as exemplified in the old-fashioned marriage, is a poetry
of externals, and certainly it has the advantage of
picturesqueness.