Part 13

And a character in “Cupid’s Whirligig” (1616) says, “I could find in my heart to pray nine times to the moone, and fast three St. Agnes’s Eves, so that I might bee sure to have him to my husband.” Aubrey gives two receipts to the ladies for that eve, which may still be useful. Take a row of pins and pull out every one, one after another, saying a Paternoster, and sticking a pin in your sleeve, and you will dream of him you shall marry. Again, “you must lie in another country, and knit the left garter about the right-legged stocking (let the other garter and stocking alone), and as you rehearse these following verses, at every comma knit a knot:—

This knot I knit, To know the thing, I know not yet, That I may see, The man that shall my husband be, How he goes, and what he wears, And what he does, all days and years.

Accordingly in your dream you will see him; if a musician, with a lute or other instrument; if a scholar, with a book or papers;” and he adds a little encouragement to use this device in the following anecdote. “A gentlewoman that I knew, confessed in my hearing that she used this method, and dreamt of her husband whom she had never seen. About two or three years after, as she was on Sunday at church (at our Lady’s Church in Sarum), up pops a young Oxonian in the pulpit; she cries out presently to her sister, ‘This is the very face of the man that I saw in my dream. Sir William Soame’s lady did the like.’” It is hardly needful to remind readers of Keats’s “Eve of St. Agnes,” and the story of Madeline,—

Whose heart had brooded, all that wintry day, On love, and wing’d St. Agnes’ saintly care, As she had heard old dames full many times declare.

Our ancestors made merry in a similar fashion on St. Valentine’s Day. So Herrick, speaking of a bride, says,—

She must no more a-maying, Or by rosebuds divine Who’ll be her Valentine.

Brand, who helps us to this quotation, gives an amusing extract from the _Connoisseur_ to the same effect. “Last Friday was Valentine’s Day, and the night before I got five bay leaves, and pinned four of them to the four corners of my pillow, and the fifth to the middle; and then, if I dreamt of my sweetheart, Betty said we should be married before the year was out. But to make it more sure, I boiled an egg hard, and took out the yolk and filled it with salt, and when I went to bed, eat it, shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it. We also wrote our lovers’ names upon bits of paper, and rolled them up in clay, and put them into water, and the first that rose up was to be our Valentine. Would you think it? Mr. Blossom was my man. I lay abed and shut my eyes all the morning till he came to our house; for I would not have seen another man before him for all the world.” The moon, “the lady moon,” has frequently been called into council about husbands from the time when she first lost her own heart to Endymion, the beautiful shepherd of Mount Latmos. Go out when the first new moon of the year first appears, and standing over the spars of a gate or stile, look on the moon and repeat as follows:—

All hail to thee, moon! all hail to thee! Prythee, good moon, reveal to me This night who my husband shall be.

You will certainly dream that night of your future husband. It is very important, too, that if you have a cat in the house, it should be a black one. A North Country rhyme says—

Whenever the cat or the house is black, The lasses o’ lovers will have no lack.

And an old woman in the north, adds Mr. Henderson,[14] said lately in accordance with this belief to a lady, “It’s na wonder Jock ——’s lasses marry off so fast, ye ken what a braw black cat they’ve got.” It is still more lucky if such a cat comes of its own accord, and takes up its residence in any house. The same gentleman gives an excellent receipt to bring lovers to the house, which was communicated to him by Canon Raine, and was gathered from the conversation of two maid-servants. One of them, it seems, peeped out of curiosity into the box of her fellow servant, and was astonished to find there the end of a tallow candle stuck through and through with pins. “What’s that, Molly,” said Bessie, “that I seed i’ thy box?” “Oh,” said Molly, “it’s to bring my sweetheart. Thou seest, sometimes he’s slow a coming, and if I stick a candle case full o’ pins it always fetches him.” A member of the family certified that John was thus duly fetched from his abode, a distance of six miles, and pretty often too.

Some of the most famous divinations about marriage are practised with hazel-nuts on Allhallowe’en. In Indo-European tradition the hazel was sacred to love; and when Loki in the form of a falcon rescued Idhunn, the goddess of youthful life, from the power of the frost-giants, he carried her off in his beak in the shape of a hazel-nut.[15] So in Denmark, as in ancient Rome, nuts are scattered at a marriage. In northern divinations on Allhallowe’en nuts are placed on the bars of a grate by pairs, which have first been named after a pair of lovers, and according to the result, their combustion, explosion, and the like, the wise divine the fortune of the lovers. Graydon has beautifully versified this superstition:—

These glowing nuts are emblems true Of what in human life we view; The ill-matched couple fret and fume, And thus in strife themselves consume; Or from each other wildly start, And with a noise for ever part. But see the happy, happy pair, Of genuine love and truth sincere; With mutual fondness, while they burn, Still to each other kindly turn; And as the vital sparks decay, Together gently sink away; Till, life’s fierce ordeal being past, Their mingled ashes rest at last.[16]

Nevertheless modes of love-divination for this special evening, which is as propitious to lovers as Valentine’s Day, may be found in Brand, and other collectors of these old customs.

Peas are also sacred to Freya, almost vying with the mistletoe in alleged virtue for lovers. In one district of Bohemia the girls go into a field of peas, and make there a garland of five or seven kinds of flowers (the goddess of love delights in uneven numbers), all of different hues. This garland they must sleep upon, lying with their right ear upon it, and then they hear a voice from underground, which tells what manner of men they will have for husbands. Sweet-peas would doubtless prove very effectual in this kind of divination, and there need be no difficulty in finding them of different hues. If Hertfordshire girls are lucky enough to find a pod containing nine peas, they lay it under a gate, and believe they will have for husband the first man that passes through. On the Borders unlucky lads and lasses in courtship are rubbed down with pea straw by friends of the opposite sex. These beliefs connected with peas are very widespread. Touchstone, it will be remembered, gave two peas to Jane Smile, saying, “with weeping tears, ‘Wear these for my sake.’”[17]

In Scotland on Shrove Tuesday a national dish called “crowdie,” composed of oatmeal and water with milk, is largely consumed, and lovers can always tell their chances of being married by putting into the porringer a ring. The finder of this in his or her portion will without fail be married sooner than any one else in the company. Onions, curiously enough, figure in many superstitions connected with marriage—why, we have no idea. It might be ungallantly suggested that it is from their supposed virtue to produce tears, or from wearing many faces, as it were, under one hood. While speaking of these unsavory vegetables, we are reminded of a passage in Luther’s “Table Talk”: “Upon the eve of Christmas Day the women run about and strike a swinish hour” (whatever this may mean): “if a great hog grunts, it decides that the future husband will be an old man; if a small one, a young man,”[18] The orpine is another magical plant in love incantations. It must be used on Midsummer Eve, and is useful to inform a maiden whether her lover is true or false. It must be stuck up in her room, and the desired information is obtained by watching whether it bends to the right or the left. Hemp-seed, sown on that evening, also possesses marvellous efficacy. One of the young ladies mentioned above, who sewed bay leaves on her pillow, and had the felicity of seeing Mr. Blossom in consequence, writes, “The same night, exactly at twelve o’clock, I planted hemp-seed in our back yard, and said to myself, ‘Hemp seed I sow, hemp-seed I hoe, and he that is my true love come after me and mow!’ Will you believe it? I looked back and saw him behind me, as plain as eyes could see him.” And she adds, as another wrinkle to her sex, “Our maid Betty tells me that if I go backwards, without speaking a word, into the garden upon Midsummer Eve, and gather a rose and keep it in a clean sheet of paper without looking at it till Christmas Day, it will be as fresh as in June; and if I then stick it in my bosom, he that is to be my husband will come and take it out.” Whatever be the virtue of Betty’s recipe, it would at all events teach a lover patience. Mr. Henderson supplies two timely cautions from Border folk-lore. A girl can “scarcely do a worse thing than boil a dish-clout in her crock.” She will be sure, in consequence, to lose all her lovers, or, in Scotch phrase, “boil all her lads awa’;” “and in Durham it is believed that if you put milk in your tea before sugar, you lose your sweetheart,”[19] We may add that unless a girl fasts on St. Catherine’s Day (Nov. 25) she will never have a good husband. Nothing can be luckier for either bachelor or girl than to be placed inadvertently at some social gathering between a man and his wife. The person so seated will be married before the year is out.

Song, play, and sonnet[20] have diffused far and wide the custom of blowing off the petals of a flower, saying the while, “He loves me—loves me not.” When this important business has been settled in the affirmative a hint may be useful for the lover going courting. If he meets a hare, he must at once turn back. Nothing can well be more unlucky. Witches are found of that shape, and he will certainly be crossed in love. Experts say that after the next meal has been eaten the evil influence is expended, and the lover can again hie forth in safety. In making presents to each other the happy pair must remember on no account to give each other a knife or a pair of scissors. Such a present effectually cuts love asunder. Take care, too, not to fall in love with one the initial of whose surname is the same as yours. It is quite certain that the union of such cannot be happy. This love-secret has been reduced into rhyme for the benefit of treacherous memories:—

To change the name and not the letter, Is a change for the worse, and not for the better.

This love-lore belongs to the Northern mythology, else the Romans would never have used that universal formula, “ubi tu Caius ego Caia.”

These directions and cautions must surely have brought our pair of happy lovers to the wedding-day. Even yet they are not safe from malign influences, but folk-lore does not forget their welfare. If the bride has been courted by other sweethearts than the one she has now definitely chosen, there is a fear lest the discarded suitors should entertain unkindly feelings towards her. To obviate all unpleasant consequences from this, the bride must wear a sixpence in her left shoe until she is “kirked,” say the Scotch. And on her return home, if a horse stands looking at her through a gateway, or even lingers along the road leading to her new home, it is a very bad omen for her future happiness.

When once the marriage-knot is tied, it is so indissoluble that folk-lore for the most part leaves the young couple alone. It is imperative, however, that the wife should never take off her wedding-ring. To do so is to open a door to innumerable calamities, and a window at the same time through which love may fly. Should the husband not find that peace and quietness which he has a right to expect in matrimony, but discover unfortunately that he has married a scold or a shrew, he must make the best of the case:—

Quæ saga, quis te solvere Thessalis Magus venenis, quis poterit deus?

Yet folk-lore has still one simple which will alleviate his sorrow. Any night he will, he may taste fasting a root of radish, say our old Saxon forefathers, and next day he will be proof against a woman’s chatter.[21] By growing a large bed of radishes, and supping off them regularly, it is thus possible that he might exhaust after a time the verbosity of his spouse, but we are bound to add that we have never heard of such an easy cure being effected. The cucking-stool was found more to the purpose in past days.

But Aphrodite lays her finger on our mouth. Having disclosed so many secrets of her worship, it is time now to be silent.

After all this love-lore, supposing any one were to take a tender interest in our welfare, we should hint to her that she had no need of borrowed charms or mystic foreshadowing of the future, in Horatian words, which we shall leave untranslated as a compliment to Girton:—

Tu ne quæsieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi Finem di dederint, Leuconoe; nec Babylonios Tentaris numeros.

Simplicity and openness of disposition are worth more than all affectations of dress or manner. Well did the Scotch lad in the song rebuke his sweetheart, who asked him for a “keekin’-glass” (_Anglice_, “looking-glass”):—

“Sweet sir, for your courtesie, When ye come by the Bass, then, For the love ye bear to me, Buy me a keekin’-glass, then.”

But he answered—

“Keek into the draw-well, Janet, Janet; There ye’ll see your bonny sel’, My jo, Janet.”

In truth, the best divination for lovers is a ready smile, and the most potent charms a maiden can possess are reticence and patience. And so to end (with quaint old Burton[22]), “Let them take this of Aristænetus (that so marry) for their comfort: ‘After many troubles and cares, the marriages of lovers are more sweet and pleasant.’ As we commonly conclude a comedy with a wedding and shaking of hands, let’s shut up our discourse and end all with an epithalamium. Let the Muses sing, the Graces dance, not at their weddings only, but all their dayes long; so couple their hearts that no irksomeness or anger ever befall them: let him never call her other name than my joye, my light; or she call him otherwise than sweetheart.”—_Belgravia._

A ROMANCE OF A GREEK STATUE.

BY J. THEODORE BENT.

I cannot tell you the story just as Nikola told it to me, with all that flow of language common in a Greek, my memory is not good enough for that; but the facts, and some of his quaint expressions, I can recount, for these I never shall forget. My travel took me to a distant island of the Greek Archipelago, called Sikinos, last winter, an island only to be reached by a sailing-boat, and here, in quarters of the humblest nature, I was storm-stayed for five long days. Nikola had been my muleteer on an expedition I made to a remote corner of the island where still are to be traced the ruins of an ancient Hellenic town, and about a mile from it a temple of Pythian Apollo. He was a fine stalwart fellow of thirty or thereabouts; he had a bright intelligent face, and he wore the usual island costume, namely, knickerbocker trousers of blue homespun calico, with a fulness, which hangs down between the legs, and when full of things, for it is the universal pocket, wabbles about like the stomach of a goose; on his head he wore a faded old fez, his feet were protected from the stones by sandals of untanned skin, and he carried a long stick in his hand with which to drive his mule.

Sikinos is perhaps the most unattainable corner of Europe, being nothing but a barren harborless rock in the middle of the Ægean sea, possessing as a fleet one caique, which occasionally goes to a neighboring island where the steamer stops, to see if there are any communications from the outer world, and four rotten fishing boats, which seldom venture more than a hundred yards from the shore. The fifteen hundred inhabitants of this rock lead a monotonous life in two villages, one of which is two hundred years old, fortified and dirty, and called the “Kastro,” or the “camp”; the other is modern, and about five minutes’ walk from the camp, and is called “the other place”; so nomenclature in Sikinos is simple enough. The inhabitants are descended from certain refugees who, two hundred years ago, fled from Crete during a revolution, and built the fortified village up on the hillside out of the reach of pirates, and remained isolated from the world ever since. Before they came, Sikinos had been uninhabited since the days of the ancient Greeks. The only two men in the place who have travelled—that is to say, who have been as far as Athens—are the Demarch, who is the chief legislator of the island, and looked up to as quite a man of the world, and Nikola, the muleteer.

I must say, the last thing I expected to hear in Sikinos was a romance, but on one of the stormy days of detention there, with the object of whiling away an hour, I paid a visit to Nikola in his clean white house in “the other place.” He met me on the threshold with a hearty “We have well met,” bade me sit down on his divan, and sent his wife—a bright, buxom young woman—for the customary coffee, sweets, and raki; he rolled me a cigarette, which he carefully licked, to my horror, but which I dared not refuse to smoke, cursed the weather, and stirred the embers in the brazier preparatory to attacking me with a volley of questions. I always disarm inquisitiveness on such occasions by being inquisitive myself. “How long have you been married?” “How many children have you got?” “How old is your wife?” and by the time I had asked half a dozen such questions, Nikola, after the fashion of the Greeks, had forgotten his own thirst for knowledge in his desire to satisfy mine.

In Nikola’s case unparalleled success attended this manœuvre, and from the furtive smiles which passed between husband and wife I realised that some mystery was attached to their unions which I forthwith made it my business, to solve.

“I always call her ‘my statue,’” said the muleteer, laughing, “‘my marble statue,’” and he slapped her on the back to show that, at any rate, she was made of pretty hard material.

“Can Pygmalion have married Galatea after all?” I remarked for the moment, forgetting the ignorance of my friends on such topics, but a Greek never admits that he does not understand, and Nikola replied, “No; her name is Kallirhoe, and she was the priest’s daughter.”

Having now broached the subject, Nikola was all anxiety to continue it; he seated himself on one chair, his wife took another, ready to prompt him if necessary, and remind him of forgotten facts. I sat on the divan; between us was the brazier; the only cause for interruption came from an exceedingly naughty child, which existed as a living testimony that this modern Galatea had recovered from her transformation into stone.

“I was a gay young fellow in those days,” began Nikola.

“Five years ago last carnival time,” put in the wife, but she subsided on a frown from her better half; for Greek husbands never meekly submit, like English ones, to the lesser portion of command, and the Greek wife is the pattern of a weaker vessel, seldom sitting down to meals, cooking, spinning, slaving,—a mere chattel, in fact.

“I was the youngest of six—two sisters and four brothers, and we four worked day after day to keep our old father’s land in order, for we were very poor, and had nothing to live upon except the produce of our land.”

Land in Sikinos is divided into tiny holdings: one man may possess half a dozen plots of land in different parts of the island, the produce of which—the grain, the grapes, the olives, the honey, etc.—he brings on mules to his store (ἀποθήκη) near the village. Each landowner has a store and a little garden around it on the hillside, just outside the village, of which the stores look like a mean extension, but on visiting them we found their use.

“We worked every day in the year except feast-days, starting early with our ploughs, our hoes, and our pruning hooks, according to the season, and returning late, driving our bullocks and our mules before us.” An islander’s tools are simple enough—his plough is so light that he can carry it over his shoulders as he drives the bullocks to their work. It merely scratches the back of the land, making no deep furrows; and when the work is far from the village the husbandman starts from home very early, and seldom returns till dusk.

“On feast-days we danced on the village square. I used to look forward to those days, for then I met Kallirhoe, the priest’s daughter, who danced the _syrtos_ best of all the girls, tripping as softly as a Nereid,” said Nikola, looking approvingly at his wife. I had seen a _syrtos_ at Sikinos, and I could testify to the fact that they dance it well, revolving in light wavy lines backwards, forwards, now quick, now slow, until you do not wonder that the natives imagine those mystic beings they call Nereids to be for ever dancing thus in the caves and grottoes. The _syrtos_ is a semicircular dance of alternate young men and maidens, holding each other by handkerchiefs, not from modesty, as one might at first suppose, but so as to give more liberty of action to their limbs, and in dancing this dance it would appear Nikola and Kallirhoe first felt the tender passion of love kindled in their breasts. But between the two a great gulf was fixed, for marriages amongst a peasantry so shrewd as the Greeks are not so easily settled as they are with us. Parents have absolute authority over their daughters, and never allow them to marry without a prospect, and before providing for any son a father’s duty is to give his daughters a house and a competency, and he expects any suitor for their hand to present an equivalent in land and farm stock. The result of this is to create an overpowering stock of maiden ladies, and to drive young men from home in search of fortunes and wives elsewhere.

This was the breach which was fixed between Nikola and Kallirhoe—apparently a hopeless case, for Nikola had sisters, and brothers, and poverty-stricken parents; he never could so much as hope to call a spade his own; during all his life he would have to drudge and slave for others. They could not run away; that idea never occurred to them, for the only escape from Sikinos was by the solitary caique. “I had heard rumors,” continued Nikola, “of how men from other islands had gone to far-off countries and returned rich, but how could I, who had never been off this rock in all my life?