_Marriage in Undress_
A century ago the law of Maine obliged a husband to pay all the debts of
his bride in case she brought him any clothing. As outer clothing was
legal property which could be taken for debt, an unfortunate couple who
were deeply in love resorted to the experiment described in the
following certificate of marriage to be found to-day in the ancient
records of Lincoln County:
“_Certificate of Marriage._”
From record of return marriages to the Court of Sessions, Lincoln
County, under date of July 7, 1775:
This is to certify that John Gatchell and Sarah Cloutman, both
inhabitants of Kennebec River, a little below Fort Halifax, and out of
the bounds of any town, but within the county of Lincoln, were first
published, as the law directs, at said court and there married; said
Cloutman being in debt was desirous of being married with no more
clothes on her than her shift, which was granted, and they married each
other on the 21st day of November, A.D. 1767.
Attest: WILLIAM LITHGOW,
_Justice of Peace_.
_A City in Darkness_
The Romans, after they had attained a high culture, when they had filled
their city with noble architecture, sculpture, engineering, monuments,
and other accompaniments of maturity, had no system of street-lightning.
Not a trace of anything of the kind has been discovered. It is referred
to in no extant books. It is, in short, as certain as anything can be,
short of absolute demonstration, that the masters of the world endured
dark streets to the end. They had plenty of good oil-lamps in their
houses. They even invented mechanical lamps, something like the Carcel
burners, for use in their libraries. But after sunset it was always
dangerous to walk the streets of Rome, and the Roman police (who were
called “cops” in the slang of the period) had enough to do. In fact,
they had more than enough to do, for they combined the functions of
policemen and firemen. Rome had a regular body of men, some nine
thousand strong. The police were well treated, if they were worked hard.
Their quarters were palaces of marble and stone; spacious, airy,
furnished with everything which could conduce to the comfort and even
luxury of the inmates. Those old Roman roundsmen and policemen were,
like all the ancient Italians, greatly addicted to scribbling on the
walls. These scribblings, after being buried for twelve or fifteen
hundred years or so, are now being uncovered and deciphered. They are
called graffiti and from them many intimate details of the old life may
be gathered. The police of ancient Rome were very human. They set down
their complaints and their opinions of their captains and
superintendents, their poor jokes (funny enough to them, no doubt) and
all their little affairs.
_The Graffiti at Pompeii_
August Mau, of the German Archæological Institute in Rome, says, “The
graffiti form the largest division of the Pompeiian inscriptions,
comprising about three thousand examples, or one-half of the entire
number; the name is Italian, being derived from a verb meaning to
scratch. Writing upon walls was a prevalent habit in antiquity, as shown
by the remains of graffiti at Rome and other places besides Pompeii, a
habit which may be accounted for in part by the use of the sharp-pointed
stylus with wax tablets; the temptation to use such an instrument upon
the polished stucco was much greater than in the case of pens and
lead-pencils upon the less carefully finished wall surfaces of our time.
Pillars or sections of wall are covered with scratches of all
kinds,—names, catchwords of favorite lines from the poets, amatory
couplets, and rough sketches, such as a ship, or the profile of a face.
The skit occasionally found on walls to-day,—
“‘Fools’ names, as well as faces,
Are often seen in public places,’—
has its counterpart in a couplet which has been preserved:
“‘Admiror, paries, te non cecidisse ruinas,
Qui tot scriptorum taedia sustineas.’
(Truly ’tis wonderful, wall, that you have not fallen in ruin;
You that have to support so many nauseous scribblings.)
“Taken as a whole, the graffiti are less fertile for our knowledge of
Pompeiian life than might have been expected. The people with whom we
should most eagerly desire to come into direct contact, the cultivated
men and women of the ancient city, were not accustomed to scratch their
names upon stucco or to confide their reflections and experiences to the
surface of a wall. Some of the graffiti, to judge from the height at
which we find them above the floor, were undoubtedly made by the hands
of boys and girls; for the rest, we may assume that the writers were as
little representative of the best elements of society as are the
tourists who scratch their names upon ancient monuments to-day.
Nevertheless, we gain from these scribblings a lively idea of individual
tastes, passions, and experiences.”
Here and there in the collection we find imitations of the jests of
Hierocles, and sometimes we are amused by inconsistencies and
contradictions which remind us of the modern Hibernicism. Of this
character is a Greek line scratched upon a wall on the Palatine hill in
Rome: “Many persons have here written many things; I alone refrain from
writing.”
_Superstition_
As to the amusing superstitions we so often witness in people of
intelligence and impressible nature, the question, even for those who
indulge in such fancies, is not whether they are reasonable. Lord Byron
would not commence an undertaking of any kind on Friday. But even Byron,
with his remarkable sensitiveness to impressions, and his habit of
brooding over the mysteries of life, would not venture to assert that
such conduct is reasonable. The “Autocrat of the Breakfast Table” says,
“Jeremy Bentham’s logic, by which he proved he couldn’t possibly see a
ghost, is all very well—in the daytime. All the reason in the world will
never get impressions of childhood out of a man’s head.” Elsewhere, Dr.
Holmes says, “We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our
tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot
educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early
implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may
reject them, he will still feel as a famous French woman did about
ghosts, ‘Je n’y crois pas; mais je les crains,’—‘I don’t believe in
them; but I am afraid of them, nevertheless.’”
_An Itemized Bill_
An old church in Belgium decided to repair its properties and employed
an artist to touch up some of its old paintings. Upon presenting his
bill, the committee in charge refused payment unless the details were
specified, whereupon he presented the items as follows: