Dennis Miller Bunker: Eleanor Hardy

"Eleanor Hardy Bunker" by Dennis Miller Bunker

"Dennis Miller Bunker met Eleanor Hardy late in the spring of 1889 and fell in love with her immediately. Never was there a more perfect example of love at first sight. The young girl, then nineteen years old, was strikingly beautiful. Her tall figure and nobly chiseled features were enhanced by a radiant mass of sun-colored hair, the strands of which seemed to have been spun out of various golds. Her interests were not those of the conventional Boston girl of her day and she cared little for the pleasures of fashionable society. The two young people found that besides being deeply in love they had interests and ideals in common as well as kindred tastes in music and in literature. 

It was characteristic of Bunker that the realization of how much he was in love provoked in him a decision never to see Miss Hardy again. He felt his poverty very keenly. The mere thought of imposing his restricted way of life on a young girl inured to security was unendurable to him. Furthermore, being fully conscious, perhaps unduly so, of the somber side of his own nature, he was reluctant to impose his melancholy moods on the only being capable of alleviating them.

But the scruples of his conscience were not to prevail. Although he had announced that he was not to see her again, a freak of chance was enough to prove the futility of his grim determination. For one spring afternoon, Miss Hardy, happening to sit in one of the horse cars which provided public transportation in those days, her conveyance came to a stop by the side of a stationary car headed in the opposite direction. In this second car sat Dennis Bunker. An instant later he had changed cars and the two were deep in conversation. Unmistakably further struggle would be of no avail.

In the autumn they made known their plans to Mr. and Mrs. Hardy, who received the news with considerable surprise, as their prospective son-in-law was a man quite unknown to them. The wedding took place on October 2nd of the following year at Emmanuel Church in Boston. It was an unconventional wedding. There were no engraved invitations, no bridesmaids, no bridal bouquet. The guests had been invited by personal notes or by word of mouth. Bunker's friend Loeffler was best man. Most of Bunker's old friends managed to be there: John Sargent, Charles Platt, Alfred Q. Collins, Appleton Brown and many others."

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "Dennis Miller Bunker" by R.H. Ives Gammell.)