Our next bride, as cute as she was, sang us a song in high G, piercing our eardrums. She screamed and turned red in the face, when we told her that Poison Pie was not interested in a child bride.

Not to be dissuaded so easily, the mushroom enumerated for us the many advantages of a child bride--the submissive attitude, the malleable personality, not to mention the tantalizing unmentionables. She admonished us not to allow our western predisposition against child brides to influence our thinking. However, what could we do? We let our western predisposition against child brides influence our thinking. We marked her down in the "The Fruit Is Not Yet Ripe" list. She knew it too. To her credit, she let us leave without further tantrums.