THE DANGEROUS SIDE.
THE LEGAL VIEW.
POOR ENCOURAGEMENT.
An Iowa school-teacher was discharged for the offence of kissing a female assistant. Whereupon a local paper inquired, “What inducement is there for any person to exile himself to the country districts of Iowa to direct the young idea in its musket-practice, if he is to be denied the ordinary luxuries of every-day life? If a Platonic exercise in osculation, occasionally, cannot be connived at, where are the mitigating circumstances in the dreary life of a Western schoolmaster? We give it up.”
KINDLY CAUTION.
A young fellow in a Western town was fined ten dollars for kissing a girl against her will, and the following day the damsel sent him the amount of his fine, with a note saying that the next time he kissed her he must be less rough about it, and be careful to do it when her father was not around.
RETALIATION.
The following colloquy occurred in an English divorce-case. Mr. Sergeant Tindal, “He treated her very kindly, did he not?” Atkinson, “Oh, yes, very; he kissed her several times.” Mr. Sergeant Tindal, “And how did she treat him?” Atkinson, “Well, she retaliated.”
AN EXPENSIVE KISS.
An interesting suit for damages was tried in the Circuit Court of Sauk County, Wisconsin. The title of the case was Helen Crager vs. The Chicago and Northwestern Railroad Company. The facts are substantially as follows. The plaintiff, who is a good-looking, interesting young lady, twenty-one years of age, and a school-teacher, on the 6th of March, 1873, bought a ticket of the company’s ticket-agent at Reedsburg, for Baraboo, and took a seat in a passenger-car attached to a mixed train. When within a few miles of her destination, the plaintiff, being at the time alone with the conductor (the only other passenger and an employé of the company having left the car), was caressed and kissed by the conductor. There being nothing in the lady’s manner to induce such familiarity, the ticket-puncher was, soon after the occurrence, arrested upon a charge of assault and battery. He pleaded guilty, was fined twenty-five dollars by the justice, and discharged by the company. The court ruled as a matter of law that the company was liable for the plaintiff for actual damage occasioned by the wrongful act of the conductor. The case was well argued, and submitted to the jury, who returned a verdict for the plaintiff, and assessed her damages at one thousand dollars.
TWENTY SHILLINGS FINE.
A noteworthy trial may be found among the proceedings of a Connecticut court held at New Haven, May 1, 1660. In this case, the kisser was Jacob M. Murline, and the kissee was Miss Sarah Tuttle. It was demonstrated that Jacob “tooke up or tooke away her gloves. Sarah desired him to give her the gloves, to which he answered he would do so if she would give him a kysse, upon which they sat down together, his arme being about her waiste, and her arme upon his shoulder or about his neck, and he kyssed her and she kyssed him, or they kyssed one another, continuing in this posture about half an hour.”
On examination, the amatory Jacob confusedly admitted that “he tooke her by the hand, and they both sat down upon a chest, but whether his arme were about her waiste, and her arme upon his shoulder or about his neck, he knows not, for he never thought of it since till Mr. Raymond told him of it at Mannatos, for which he was blamed, and told he had not layed it to heart as he ought.” Jacob and Sarah were each fined twenty shillings. So much for two centuries ago.
BREACH OF PROMISE.
Breach-of-promise trials are of frequent occurrence in the English courts, and any contribution to the law of the subject is received with interest. The English papers, therefore, comment with great relish upon the definition of a marriage engagement given by Judge Neilson, of Brooklyn, who, in a suit for money damages for blighted affections, charged the jury that the “gleam of the eye and the conjunction of the lips are overtures when they become frequent and protracted.” In the face of such a decision he is a rash man who would say, in the words of the song, “I know an eye both soft and bright,” and that variety of kiss known as the “lingering” is positively interdicted to gentlemen who do not mean business, or who are liable to a change of mind.
THE INGENUITY OF THIEVES.
When the Pope’s chamberlain, who was captured by Italian brigands, paid fifty thousand francs as ransom-money to the leader of the band, the sight of the money so transported him that he fell on his knees and begged to kiss the hand of his captive before he departed. The prelate stretched out his hand to him, forgetting that he wore a ring of great value, which the scoundrel, as he kissed the hand, slyly slipped over the finger and appropriated to himself.
This incident was more than paralleled by French dexterity in a case which is thus reported by a Paris correspondent:
There is a pretty little creature who has bestowed upon herself the cognomen of Diane de Bagatelle, with whom a well-known young viscount is madly in love. Mlle. Diane is a very romantic young lady, with a taste for the plays and novels of the younger Dumas, and especially for the “Dame aux Camellias.” So she was not surprised when one day the card of the Count de X——, the father of the viscount in question, was handed to her, and an elegant elderly gentleman, faultlessly dressed, and with the red ribbon of the Legion of Honor at his button-hole, was ushered into her boudoir.
“My son loves Mademoiselle,” began the count, without further preface.
“I know it,” sighed Diane.
“He has——”
“A sister!” exclaimed the lady, remembering the interview between Marguerite Gautier and the elder Duval.
“No, not a sister, but a cousin,—his cousin Blanche, to whom he has been betrothed for years. She pines and weeps, and you, mademoiselle, you and your fatal charms are the cause.”
“Alas!” sighed Diane, feeling herself Doche and Blanche Pierson rolled into one and in real earnest.
“Your sensibility does you honor. Will you break with my son at once and forever? And if two hundred thousand francs——”
“Two hundred thousand francs!”
“I will draw you a check at once.”
“Sir,” exclaimed the lady, “you have not made appeal to a callous heart. I will make the sacrifice; I will give up Henri. You said, I think, two hundred thousand?”
“I did. Blessings on you, my child!” exclaimed the count, fervently. “Write the letter I shall dictate, and the check shall be yours.”
So down Diane sat, and penned the following epistle:
“Dear Henri, I love you no more. In fact, I never have loved you. I love another. Farewell forever.
“Diane.”
The count took the letter, inspected it carefully, and placed it in his pocket-book, from which he then drew a check for the amount named, which he placed in the lady’s eager hands.
“Allow me, my child, to raise to my lips the gentle hand that has just saved my son!” A kiss and a tear fell on the dainty hand together; it was then released, and the aged nobleman departed. He had not been long gone when Mlle. Diane discovered that her diamond ring, which was valued at ten thousand francs, had disappeared from her finger; and further investigations proved that her silverware and other articles of value had also vanished. The pretended count was no other than a swindler of the very worst type. The worst of the affair was that the scamp actually mailed the letter of Mlle. Diane to the viscount, so that the lady found herself minus an adorer as well as her valuables.
THE MEDICAL VIEW.
DON’T KISS THE BABY.
The promiscuous kissing of children is a pestilent practice. We use the word advisedly, and it is mild for the occasion. Murderous would be the proper word, did the kissers know the mischief they do. Yes, madam, murderous; and we are speaking to you. Do you remember calling on your dear friend Mrs. Brown the other day, with a strip of flannel round your neck? And when little Flora came dancing into the room, didn’t you pounce upon her demonstratively, call her a precious little pet, and kiss her? Then you serenely proceeded to describe the dreadful sore throat that kept you from prayer-meeting the night before. You had no designs on the dear child’s life, we know; nevertheless, you killed her! Killed her as surely as if you had fed her with strychnine or arsenic. Your caresses were fatal.
Two or three days after, the little pet began to complain of a sore throat too. The symptoms grew rapidly alarming; and when the doctor came, the single word diphtheria sufficed to explain them all. To-day a little mound in Greenwood is the sole memento of your visit.
Of course the mother does not suspect, and would not dare to suspect, you of any Instrumentality in her bereavement. She charges it to a mysterious Providence. The doctor says nothing to disturb the delusion; that would be impolitic, if not cruel: but to an outsider he is free to say that the child’s death was due directly to your infernal stupidity. Those are precisely the words: more forcible than elegant, it is true; but who shall say, under the circumstances, that they are not justifiable? Remember,
“Evil is wrought by want of thought
As well as by want of heart.”
It would be hard to tell how much of the prevalent sickness and mortality from diphtheria is due to such want of thought. As a rule, adults have the disease in so mild a form that they mistake it for a simple cold; and, as a cold is not contagious, they think nothing of exposing others to their breath or to the greater danger of labial contact. Taking into consideration the well-established fact that diphtheria is usually if not always communicated by the direct transplanting of the malignant vegetation which causes the disease, the fact that there can be no more certain means of bringing the contagion to its favorite soil than the act of kissing, and the further fact that the custom of kissing children on all occasions is all but universal, it is not surprising that, when the disease is once imported into a community, it is very likely to become epidemic.
It would be absurd to charge the spread of diphtheria entirely to the practice of child-kissing. There are other modes of propagation: though it is hard to conceive of any more directly suited to the spread of the infection or more general in its operation. It stands to diphtheria in about the same relation that promiscuous hand-shaking formerly did to the itch.
It were better to avoid the practice. The children will not suffer if they go unkissed; and their friends ought for their sake to forego the luxury for a season. A single kiss has been known to infect a family; and the most careful may be in condition to communicate the disease without knowing it. Beware, then, of playing Judas, and let the babies alone.
EXCESSIVE GALLANTRY.
The late Marquis de Prades-Conti, ex-officer of the body-guard of Charles X., died from the effects of what might be called an excess of gallantry. He had never been ill a day, and retained all his activity in spite of his eighty-two years, but in stooping to kiss the hand of the Dowager Countess de la Rochepeon, who came to pay him a visit, he fell dead.