WEDDING JESTS.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3352, 20 December 1926, Page 8

WEDDING JESTS.

(Loudon Daily Telegraph.) Eour-and-sixpence will seem to anyone whose marriage is a recent and unuevring memory a singularly moderate tariff for chalking “Just married; don’t disturb us” on the carriage-door of a, honeymoon couple. Tho commercial traveller whose sense of humor has just cost him that reasonable sum will, however, receive the sympathy of an only too large section of society. It is indeed to be feared that tho cowers that be in the London, Midland, and Scottish Railway Company have laid themselves open, through their solicitude for tho cleanliness of their roll-ing-stock, to tho charge of being killjoys and spoil-sports. Even a mother-in-law can barely claim to a more popular figure of fun than is a “new-ly-wed,” as the horrid phrase describes persons who have just committed matrimony. Why these two deserving classes of society should merely have to ho mentioned for the audience to break into merry peals of laughter we may leave for a jury of Widow Twankeys and music-hall comedians to decide. The fact, is beyond dispute. From one AfffHJ’tant angle the “newly-wed” comes A*n for an even greater share of witticisms inVtn the mother-in-law. The latter lady is. a personage to be the target of practical jokes. Ihe boldest of jesters -.wotiVM shrink from scribbling “Beware ol jay f'oV'^cr; I am a mother-in-law” on the outside ut trains in which she rides. She never arrives at hotels with rice or confetti clinging guiltily to her clothes.) All, these things may, and do, hai-pen to the freshly inaried. They, poor souls, as if they had not sufficient to excite and embarrass them already, are the victims of innumerable amateur publicity agents. Their best men and their brothers, vie with the bridesmaids and sisters (and even with their mothers-in-law. who. after all. are human. and enjoy a joke) in telling the world that they arc come straight from the altar, ami that “The Voice that breath’d o'er Eden” is still ringing in their ears. One would feel for them more deeply if. as soon as they have • been through the matrimonial mill, they did not join so eagerly in putting other people through it. The blushing bride of yesterday is the brazen thrower of confetti to-day. and the most that can he said in her defence is that, unlike her grandmother, she does not throw old hoots.