198 MISSOURI AGRICULTURAL REPORT. 



give your answer.' The dishes were done up. The family sat and con- 

 versed until retiring time and the next morning Mary was called on for 

 her reply. She said she was willing to marry the man. The father was 

 a justice of the peace, and he said : 'If you want to get married, I will 

 marry you this morning.' The young man said : T don't want to marry 

 so soon as that. I want to go home and tell my brother and we want 

 to add what conveniences we can to the premises, in our crude way, and 

 if agreeable to everybody, I will go home and come back in two weeks 

 and be married then.' It was agreed, he went home ; he and his brother 

 did as he said and at the end of the two weeks he came back and the 

 next morning they were married. He got on his horse and rode to the 

 stile blocks, his girl wife leaped on behind him and their bridal tour was 

 forty miles through the wilderness back to his home. The sequel to that 

 story is they lived a long, happy and prosperous life, raising a large 

 family and today as a result of that union, their grandson is a professor 

 in the School of Mines at Rolla, Missouri, Professor Wilkerson." This 

 marriage of real pioneer life seems a very crude marriage to us, but, 

 ladies and gentlemen, fellow citizens and Missourians, I am going to 

 take the stand on this platform in the year 1905, and say that there was 

 more sanctity, more manhood and womanhood and more real marriage in 

 that marriage than there is in half the marriages of today. 



Now, ladies and gentlemen, I have talked to you long enough. I 

 do not know just what the future of Missouri will be, but my ideal is a 

 very high one now. I do not know what my own future may be, nor do I 

 know that I am specially concerned on that point, but I know that I was 

 born in Missouri, the mother and father who gave me birth are buried 

 in Missouri and when life's journey is over with me, there is one wish 

 above all others that I now make, and that is, that I sleep in her bosom 

 and mingle my ashes with her dust. 



I thank vou. 



