People's Pilot, Volume 3, Number 15, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 29 September 1893 — WANTED IT BRIEF. [ARTICLE]

WANTED IT BRIEF.

The Marriage Ceremony of a Tonne Now York Newspaper Man. A New York Presbyterian minister has given a curious account of his first marriage ceremony. The groom, a friend of the niinister, was a young newspaper man. On the afternoon of the wedding day he called upoa the clergyman. “I suppose it doe# not make any difference to you what form you use?” the young* man said. “Not the slightest,” answered the clergyman. “Well,” said the prospective bridegroom, “I have looked over a number of services, and have picked out the Dutch Reformed because it is the shortest. But even that is much U»o long. You preachers can’t be expected to know anything about boiling things down. I have brought you a< Dutch Reformed prayerbook, and you will see that I have knocked out all that I think is unnecessary.” “With that,” says the minister, “he left me, and I opened the book at the marriage service. It was a network of black lines. That young man, so used to cutting copy, had actually edited the marriage service, and had knocked out, as he expressed it, at least twothirds of it. “It shocked me at first to see a prayerbook so mutilated, but in the evening I followed copy like a faithful compositor, and the whole ceremony did not take more than three minutes. He was delighted, but the bride had a little bone to pick with me. “She had had a hand in the editing, I imagine, for in the promise to ‘love, honor and obey,’ the word obey had been marked out. But in the excitement of the moment I left it in. “Do,you know,” the clergyman continued, “that young man taught me a lesson about using gorgeous lithographed marriage certificates. I bought the handsomest, one I could find and carried it with me, filled out and ready. When I handed it to him he looked at it and smiled. “ ‘Nonsense,’ said he, ‘do you think I’m an art store?’ ,and he tore a blank leaf from a book on the parlor table and wrote upon it these words with his stylograph: “ ‘This certifies that at Flushing, L. 1., on Tuesday, the 18th day of March, 1873, I united John Smith and Abigail Jones in the bonds of matrimony.’ “I signed it, and the deed was done." —N. Y. Sun.