check upon the impetuous advocates, had their partisanship been less warm :

"Then I will sacrifice my wishes for your sakes!"

Before she could qualify the partial pledge, the niece summoned Madame's maid, and herself ran to a wardrobe for the wedding-gown. It was of lavender silk, softened by the rich laces in which Madame was a famous connoisseur.

Colonel Burr and Doctor Bogart had been in the house for an hour and a half when the stately figure, attended by the young relatives, descended the staircase. The spacious landings and easy grades afforded ample opportunity for a good view of the group from below. Eight servants, who had caught the news of the impending event, were on the lookout, peering in at open doors and windows, and saw the bridegroom, with the alert grace man of one third of his years, come forward to receive Madame at the stair-foot. In his prime Burr was the handsomest, as he was the most brilliant, man of his generation. His black eyes never lost their flashing lights, or his voice its music. His smile was radiantly sweet; his manner the perfection of gracious courtesy. He was probably not the

of a

least"in love" with the woman he now held by the hand, but his feigned ardor was without spot or blemish to the most critical of the group that saw the twain made one in the name of the Church and Heaven.

The two kinspeople to whose fond persuasions Madame had yielded her better judgment, "stood up" with the elderly couple. The ceremony was performed in the room at the left of the entrance-hall, known in the Jumels' time as "the tea-room." It was the favorite parlor of Monsieur and of Madame Jumel. There were no witnesses of the strange scene enacted there besides the two attendants I have mentioned and the gaping, awe-stricken servants clustered without.

Madame's flutter of nerves subsided before the benediction was pronounced. As the urbane hostess she ordered the wedding-feast to be prepared and served, and made clergyman and guests welcome to it. The burglars had not rifled the wine-vault. There were bins. and bottles there thick with the dust and cobwebs of fifty years, and the late master of the mansion had been a noted authority upon wines. No choicer vintage was served in these United States than that in which the

health and happiness of the wedded pair were pledged that evening.

A family joke, led on and relishfully enjoyed by Colonel Burr, was that the officiating dominie, underrating the potency of the Jumel wines, became, as Burr put it, "very jolly," before the party of five left the table: Admitting this, we assume that Madame's coachman was detailed to occupy the driver's seat in the Burr gig on the late return to town.

The roads were rough, but not dark, for the moon was at the full. This we know from the fact that it was eclipsed during the evening. The wedding company watched the phenomenon from the portico, the newly-made husband and wife side by side.

"Madame!" said Burr, taking her hand in gallant tenderness, as they stood thus, "The Americans will fear me more than ever, now that two such brains as yours and mine are united."

When the news of the marriage flew over the city the next day, there was astonishment in many homes, and in one such lamentation. as Dido may have launched after her perfidious lover. A woman, younger and more beautiful than the heiress for whom she was