The Wedding Brigade.
--The numerous marriages occurring in the city seem to have created a perfect mania for attending weddings. The old Funeral Brigade — that fine body of females, who, in peace times, would capture a whole line of hacks at one charge, and only let the hearse escape because it didn't have any seats; who would skirmish with a widower for a ride to his wife's funeral, and cause a remarkable display of agility on the part of little orphans desirous to follow a parent to the grave — has come to light again. It has now become the "Wedding Brigade," and well it does its duty under its new colors. Their familiar faces remind one of other and more peaceful days, when a man might be married on Tuesday without the uncomfortable reflection of having to return to his regiment and be shot on the following Thursday. The fact that invitations are not issued to this brigade makes no difference, and quite as little does the other fact that they never heard of the parties before. It is enough to announce that there is to be a wedding, and those active burial parties promptly swarm to the front; those near the altar acting as infantry, and those a little further back mounting the benches and backs of the pews, while a few guerrillas capture the chancel. They comprise all ages: the little girl who is hardly old enough to know what a wedding is (if there is any age at which they are ignorant on that subject); the young lady of maturer years, with whom "the harvest is ended," and who comes to see what a more successful reaper has gathered, and the married woman who goes for — nobody knows what. It was of this last class, we believe, that the great and good Smith remarked that he couldn't see how it was that when a woman had "done for" one man she could not let weddings alone.--They are not partial to any particular church, but the Episcopal service is, perhaps, the favorite, because it takes about three minutes longer to subjugate a man than any other.This is a war institution — this Wedding Brigade; at least let us hope so, and let us hope, too, that the time will soon return when every Frederick Augustus may lead his trembling Celestina to the altar without having her exposed to the gaze of these idle, curious, and often vulgar, wedding mobs.
