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Show ST. VALENTINE IN YEAR 1754 Love Plaints of Youths and Maidens Certainly No Sillier Now Than Then. Some folks find everything v;rsl than what Is old. Among other things, the behavior of youth is condemned as more thoughtless and inconsequential than ever before. The young girl is called unconscionably silly T;i regard to men. But just read this confession of a young girl in 1754: "Last Friday was St. Valentine's day, and the night before I got five bay leaves, and pinned four on the 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 ate it, shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it. We also wrote our lovers' names upor bits of paper, and rolled them up in clay, and put them into water; and the first that rose was to be our valentine. Would you think it? Mr. Blossom was my man. 1 lay abed, and shut my eyes, all the morning till he came to our house, for 1 would not have seen another an-other man before him for all the world." Probably the popular song of today is the most inane form that the alphabet alpha-bet has ever taken. And yet in the eighteenth century "The Cabinet of Love; or Cupid's Repository," used to contain this sort of thing: The beauties of her polished mind. It needs no lover's eye to find; The hermit freezing in his cell, Might wish the gentle Flavia well. Certainly the gentle Flavia deserved "the book." And just listen: You are the girl I delight in Much more than haddock, smelts, or whiting. This may not be quite so bad as the contemporary popular song, but it isn't worlds away. Possibly, after all, our predecessors didn't have so much on us in the line of perfection. Collier's Weekly. |