A Book of Burlesques | Page 7

to Field Marshal von Hindenburg, and is said to be at work on a
military mass for four orchestras, seven brass bands and ten choirs,
with the usual soloists and clergy. Among his principal works are Der
Ewigen Wiederkunft (a ten part fugue for full orchestra),
Biergemütlichkeit, his Oberkellner and Uebermensch concert overtures,
and his setting (for mixed chorus) of the old German hymn:
Saufst--stirbst! Saufst net--stirbst a! Also, saufst!
Kraus is now a resident of Munich, where he conducts the orchestra at
the Löwenbräuhaus. He has been married eight times and is at present
the fifth husband of Tilly Heintz, the opera singer. He has been
decorated by the Kaiser, by the King of Sweden and by the Sultan of
Turkey, and is a member of the German Odd Fellows.

III.--THE WEDDING
III.--The Wedding. A Stage Direction
The scene is a church in an American city of about half a million

population, and the time is about eleven o'clock of a fine morning in
early spring. The neighborhood is well-to-do, but not quite fashionable.
That is to say, most of the families of the vicinage keep two servants
(alas, more or less intermittently!), and eat dinner at half-past six, and
about one in every four boasts a colored butler (who attends to the fires,
washes windows and helps with the sweeping), and a last year's
automobile. The heads of these families are merchandise brokers;
jobbers in notions, hardware and drugs; manufacturers of candy, hats,
badges, office furniture, blank books, picture frames, wire goods and
patent medicines; managers of steamboat lines; district agents of
insurance companies; owners of commercial printing offices, and other
such business men of substance--and the prosperous lawyers and
popular family doctors who keep them out of trouble. In one block live
a Congressman and two college professors, one of whom has written
an unimportant textbook and got himself into "Who's Who in America."
In the block above lives a man who once ran for Mayor of the city, and
came near being elected.
The wives of these householders wear good clothes and have a liking
for a reasonable gayety, but very few of them can pretend to what is
vaguely called social standing, and, to do them justice, not many of
them waste any time lamenting it. They have, taking one with another,
about three children apiece, and are good mothers. A few of them
belong to women's clubs or flirt with the suffragettes, but the majority
can get all of the intellectual stimulation they crave in the Ladies'
Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, with Vogue added for its
fashions. Most of them, deep down in their hearts, suspect their
husbands of secret frivolity, and about ten per cent. have the proofs,
but it is rare for them to make rows about it, and the divorce rate
among them is thus very low. Themselves indifferent cooks, they are
unable to teach their servants the art, and so the food they set before
their husbands and children is often such as would make a Frenchman
cut his throat. But they are diligent housewives otherwise; they see to it
that the windows are washed, that no one tracks mud into the hall, that
the servants do not waste coal, sugar, soap and gas, and that the family
buttons are always sewed on. In religion these estimable wives are
pious in habit but somewhat nebulous in faith. That is to say, they

regard any person who specifically refuses to go to church as a
heathen, but they themselves are by no means regular in attendance,
and not one in ten of them could tell you whether transubstantiation is
a Roman Catholic or a Dunkard doctrine. About two per cent. have
dallied more or less gingerly with Christian Science, their average
period of belief being one year.
The church we are in is like the neighborhood and its people:
well-to-do but not fashionable. It is Protestant in faith and probably
Episcopalian. The pews are of thick, yellow-brown oak, severe in
pattern and hideous in color. In each there is a long, removable
cushion of a dark, purplish, dirty hue, with here and there some of its
hair stuffing showing. The stained-glass windows, which were all
bought ready-made and depict scenes from the New Testament,
commemorate the virtues of departed worthies of the neighborhood,
whose names appear, in illegible black letters, in the lower panels. The
floor is covered with a carpet of some tough, fibrous material,
apparently a sort of grass, and along the center aisle it is much worn.
The normal smell of the place is rather less unpleasant than that of
most other halls, for on the one day when it is regularly crowded
practically all of the persons gathered together have been very recently
bathed.
On