CHAPTER XV
EPITHALAMIUM
Our marriage day! Oh, day of days ! Dawn of a new existence ! All nature seemed to sympathise with us in our supernal joy. For us, for us alone in all the world the streamlets murmured, the breezes whispered together, the wavelets plashed musically, the blue sky glowed, the sun shone goldingly. The venerable pastor of the community he who had watched over every man and woman present from infancy, who had christened, and married, and buried the whole population of the island as they require these offices read the time-honoured service of the Church of England, which was followed with deepest reverential attention by all present. When he blessed our union in the solemn language of the ritual familiar to me in the days of my childhood, every head was bowed, each woman's eye was wet with heart-felt sympathy and warmest affec- tion for their erst-while playmate.
The day was cloudless, a breeze at times sighed through the fragrant foliage of the grove wherein the little church had been built. The wavelets murmured on the beach, and the unresting surges seemed but to exchange loving memories of coral islands and crystal seas, of waving palms and the green gladness of tropic forests, of maidens, feather-crowned and flower-bejewelled, dancing on silver strands beneath the full-orbed midnight moon, or gliding, a laughing bevy of syrens, beneath the translucent wave. No sullen, dirge-like refrain on that paradisal day brought
