The wedding came off about four months later, after Miss Paragon's Paris
trousseau had safely arrived. Just how to describe such a wedding in
reasonable space is a problem, for the plans of it were described in the
newspapers weeks beforehand,--all the decorations and preparations, as
well as the ancestry, possessions, and accomplishments of both bride and
groom. The Associated Press sent out two descriptions of the wedding
gown,--one technical, by an expert, and one imaginative, by a
sympathetic artist. On the day before the wedding the Fifth Avenue
church--the church where "Robbie" had taught Sunday-school, and had for
thirty years listened to the edifying sermons of the Reverend Doctor
Lettuce Spray, the church, with all its marvellous riot of flowers--was
pictured with pen and pencil, and after the great event the front pages
of all the New York papers were given up to telling an eager and
expectant people everything about it that could be described or
imagined. By that time, of course, the radical press had forgotten all
its vehemence about Hungerville, and Mr. Robert van Rensselaer was again
the noted financier, the prominent social light, the eminent citizen,
and the inimitable _raconteur_. After the couple were safely married,
and had spent a long honeymoon upon the _Comet_, and drunk the full cup
of their bliss, I remember reading in the New York papers an address
which our Robbie had delivered before the Young Men's Mohammedan
Association of Podunk, the theme being industrial brotherhood and the
community of interest between capital and labor.