As a contrast to all this laxity of behaviour, let me state that in the very locality where it obtained--the Connecticut Valley--other sweethearts are said to have been forced to a most ceremonious courtship, to whisper their tender nothings through a "courting-stick," a hollow stick about an inch in diameter and six or eight feet long, fitted with mouth- and ear-pieces. In the presence of the entire family, lovers, seated formally on either side of the great fireplace, carried on this chilly telephonic love-making. One of these bâtons of propriety still is preserved in Longmeadow, Mass.
Of this primitive colony with primitive manners some very extraordinary cases of bucolic love at first sight are recorded--love that did not follow the law of pounds, shillings, and pence. At an ordination in Hopkinton, New Hampshire, a country bumpkin forgot the place, the preacher, and the preaching, in the ravishing sight of an unknown damsel whom he saw for the first time within the meeting-house. He sat entranced through the long sermon, the tedious psalm-singings, the endless prayers, until at last the services were over. In an ecstasy of uncouth and unreasoning passion he rushed out of church, forced his way through the departing congregation, seized the unknown fair one in his arms crying out, "Now I have got ye, you jade, I have! I have!" And from so startling and unalluring a beginning, a marriage followed. In a neighboring community a dignified officer of the law went to "warn out of town" a strange "transient woman" who might become a pauper, and would then have to be kept at the town's expense, were this ceremony omitted. Terrified at the majesty of the law and its grand though incomprehensible wording, the young warned one burst into tears, which so worked upon the tender-hearted officer that he (being conveniently a widower) proposed to her offhand, was called in meeting, married her, and thus took her under his own and the town's protection. More than one case of "marriage at first sight" is recounted, of bold Puritan wooers riding up to the door of a fair one whom they had never seen, telling their story of a lonely home, forlorn housekeeping, and desired marriage, giving their credentials, obtaining a hasty consent, and sending in their "publishings" to the town clerk, all within a day's time.