Oh ye perjured traffickers in marriage vows! ye buyers and sellers of hearts--hearts! they are not articles of commerce--buyers and sellers of the bodies that might envelope and contain celestial spirits, eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow ye die! To-morrow your home, that temple of the affections, which God himself has consecrated, shall be their tomb, within whose walls shall be endured the torpor of death with the acute consciousness of life!
Our simple friends wotted not of the miseries of artificial life. These had never even crossed the threshold of their imaginations. The colonel gave his hearty consent for the asking, and his prudent help-mate was too true-hearted a woman to withhold hers. There are those wise as serpents, if not harmless as doves, in village life; and such shook their heads, and wondered if the colonel calculated to live and be post-master for ever! or if Loyd could be such a fool as to expect to succeed to the office, when every body knew it was just as good as promised to Mr. Barton! Loyd Barnard, a steady, _consistent_ (our own side is always consistent) whig, expect the tender mercies of the Jackson party! No, Loyd Barnard indulged no such extravagant expectation. He had stood by 'old Massachusetts' through her obstinate or her _consistent_ opposition to the general government, and he expected to reap the customary reward of such firmness or--prejudice. To confess the truth, he thought little about the future, and not all of the Malthusian theories. His present happiness was enough, and it was brightened with the soft and equal light of the past. As to Paulina, it was her nature,
'Ne'er to forgather wi' sorrow and care, But gie them a skelp as they're creepin alang.'
The preliminaries being adjusted, it was agreed on all hands that the wedding should not be deferred. Quilts were quilted--the publishment pasted on the church door--and the wedding-cake made. Never had the colonel seemed better and brighter; his step was firmer, his person more erect than usual; and his face reflected the happiness of his children, as the leafless woods warm and kindle in a spring sunshine.
At this moment came one of those sudden changes that mock at human calculations. An epidemic influenza, fatal to the feeble and the old, was passing over the whole country. Colonel Barnard was one of its first victims. He died after a week's illness; and though he was some years beyond the authorized period of mortality, his death at this moment occasioned a general shock, as if he had been cut off in the prime of life. All--even his enemies, we should have said, but enemies he had none--spoke of the event in a subdued voice, and with the sincerest expressions of regret. The grief of his own little family we have not space to describe, or, if we had, how could we depict the desolation of a home from which such a fountain of love and goodness was suddenly removed? Notwithstanding the day of the funeral was one of the coldest of a severe January, the mercury being some degrees below cipher, and the gusty, cutting wind driving the snow into billows, numbers collected from the adjoining towns to pay the last tribute of respect to the good colonel.