Most fearful they are to contemplate, the expenses of this entertainment. They will certainly be over two hundred dollars, and may be three hundred; and three hundred dollars is more than the year’s income of many a person in this room. There are able-bodied men here who work from early morning until late at night, in ice-cold cellars with a quarter of an inch of water on the floor⁠—men who for six or seven months in the year never see the sunlight from Sunday afternoon till the next Sunday morning⁠—and who cannot earn three hundred dollars a year. There are little children here, scarce in their teens, who can hardly see the top of the work benches⁠—whose parents have lied to get them their places⁠—and who do not make the half of three hundred dollars a year, and perhaps not even the third of it. And then to spend such a sum, all in a single day of your life, at a wedding-feast! (For obviously it is the same thing, whether you spend it at once for your own wedding, or in a long time, at the weddings of all your friends.)