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But if I show my good will towards 'em by stirrin' up fruit-cakes and bride-cake, and pickin' chickens, and pressin' 'em, and makin' ice-cream and coffee and sandwitches, and workin' myself completely tired out, a wishin' 'em well, why, then they can depend on it that I am sincere in my good wishes."
With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then and there and die at once, the complete realization of the ghastly waxwork at the Fair, I shrank under her touch. "What do you think that is?" she asked me, again pointing with her stick; "that, where those cobwebs are?" "I can't guess what it is, ma'am." "It's a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!"
Jack, who had cherished some vague notion that every girl was something between a saint and a bride-cake ornament, was agreeably surprised at this conversation with his small admirer, and readily complied with her request. Several of the games he had never seen before, but he made bold attempts to play them some way or another, and soon entered into the spirit of his surroundings.
The bride-cake was considered a miracle of art, and the fact that Martha divided it with a steady hand, making the neatest and cleanest of cuts, was considered a good omen for her married life. Bits of the cake were afterwards in great demand throughout the neighborhood, not so much to eat, as to dream upon. The afternoon passed away rapidly, with mirth and noise, in the adjoining parlor.
Equal gaiety reigned within doors, where a large party of friends were entertained. Every one laughed at his own pleasantry, without attending to that of his neighbours. Loads of bride-cake were distributed.
I then perceived that what I had taken for a bride-cake was really an admirably executed model of a lofty range of mountains, whose snow-clad peaks were not unlike the familiar sugar pinnacles and minarets. "These are the Himalayas, or at least the Surinam branch of them," he remarked, "showing the principal passes between India and Afghanistan. It is an excellent model.
It was like a hundred other weddings at which he had been; and, seeing the bride and bridegroom seated together as usual, and the pretty bridemaids tittering, as usual, and the gentle dullness lighted up with here and there a feeble jest, as usual, he could hardly realize that horrible things lay beneath the surface of all this snowy bride-cake, and flowers, and white veils, and weak jocoseness.
"As a confessor of the True Faith," Anthony warned her, "you must never believe what you read in the County History. The house in question is a vast and pompous contiguity of stucco, in the style of 1830. It looks like a Riviera hotel a good deal run to seed. It looks like a shabby relation of Buckingham Palace. It looks like a barrack decorated with the discoloured trimmings of a bride-cake."
She looked at Sarah Pocket with triumph in her weird eyes, and so I left my fairy godmother, with both her hands on her crutch stick, standing in the midst of the dimly lighted room beside the rotten bride-cake that was hidden in cobwebs. Sarah Pocket conducted me down, as if I were a ghost who must be seen out. She could not get over my appearance, and was in the last degree confounded.
You will be on your ranges, some of these odd days, when I depart this life; and then you'll never know what I have to tell you." "If it were any thing worth telling, you would have told it long ago; for a woman cannot keep a secret, that we all know." "Ah, boy! boy! God bless you, and good-by! I wonder will that wench, Barbara, think to send me a bit of the bride-cake?
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