Although there was much amusement over this incongruous function, the absence of any sense of embarrassment in witnessing so delicate a ceremony--one which in another setting would easily have become indelicate--was no doubt an unconscious tribute to the primitive simplicity of the contracting parties.
And always there were revival meetings to which they might go and hear dramatic recitals of marvelous personal "experiences," full of imagery,--travels in heaven or hell,--with always the resounding human note which ever prevails in vital reach for truth. Through it all they discerned the cry which finds the heart of a listener and brings him into indissoluble relation with his brother man, no matter how great the darkness out of which the note may come. It is universal.
The call is in every heart, uttered or unexpressed, and one day it will pierce the heavens, finding the blue for him who sends it forth, and for the listener as well if his heart be attuned.
Let who will go and sit through one of these services, and if he does not come away subdued and silent, more tender at heart, and, if need be, stronger of hand to clasp and to lift, perhaps--well, perhaps his mind is open only to the pictorial and the spectacular.
There is no telling how long the house-party would have remained in Paradise but for the inexorable calendar which warned certain of its members that they would be expected to answer the royal summons of Comus at the approaching carnival; and of course the important fact that certain bills from the legislature affecting the public weal were awaiting the governor's signature.
A surprising number of marriages followed this visit, seeming to confirm a report of an absurd number of engagements made on the island.
There is a certain old black woman living yet "down by the old basin" in French New Orleans, a toothless old crone who, by the irony of circumstance, is familiarly known as "Ol' Mammy Molar," who "remembers" many things of this time and occasion, which she glibly calls "de silveringineer party," and who likes nothing better than an audience.
If she is believed, this much too literal account of a far-away time is most meager and unfaithful, for she does most strenuously insist that, for instance, there was served at the servants' table on that first night--