The Upper Ten Thousand Author:Charles Astor Bristed Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER 11. A Wedding 'above Bleecker.' THE first thing, as a general rule, that a young Goth- amite does is to get a horse; the second, to get a wife. Havin... more »g, therefore, seen Henry Benson on the road, it naturally follows in order that we should go to see him married. A fashionable marriage is an event to honour which all nature and all art are expected to put on their best face, and present themselves in their brightest colours. You go to such a wedding prepared to see the nicest kind of people under the most favorable circumstances. Accordingly, whereas in my last we found it necessary to mention Bowery Boys and newspaper editors, and various other low characters, not to speak of our friend Tibbets Schuyler, who is decidedly ' second set,' I shall, on the present occasion, introduce you to none but the real respectable, fashionable, exquisite part of New York society, the very cream of the cream; and if you find them very slow, it isn't my fault. I have an idea that fashionable people are stupid all over the world, even when they are fastest. The appellation of Gotham was first given to New York by Washington Irving in his earliest work, Salmagundi, evidently alluding to the singular wisdom of the inhabitants; and the city is now familiarly known throughout America by this name; just as Boston, for less evident reasons, is generally called the American Athens. It is mid-winter still, and there is snow on the ground ; but the sleighing is not so good as it was, and the state of the streets admits 'wheeling.' Wheeling Benson is, not in the ancient olive chariot which he usually does his grandfather the honour to borrow when going out, for to-night the old gentleman is going out himself ; but in the neat claret brougham of his first groomsman, Philip Van Horne, under...« less