A Maryland editor, on the subject of kissing, says, “The custom is an old one, and no written description can do it justice; to be fully understood and appreciated it must be handed down from mouth to mouth.”
“Stay,” he said, his right arm around her waist and her face expectantly turned to him, “shall it be the kiss pathetic, sympathetic, graphic, paragraphic, Oriental, intellectual, paroxysmal, quick and dismal, slow and unctuous, long and tedious, devotional, or what?” She said perhaps that would be the better way.
Reference having been made to the basial diversities mentioned in the Bible, it was incidentally remarked that there is another kind of kiss which young ladies receive on the sofa in the parlor after the gas is turned low, which the Scriptures don’t mention,—nor the young ladies either.
An Indiana editor advises people against using a hard pencil, and goes on to tell why. His wife desired him to write a note to a lady, inviting her to meet a party of friends at her house. After “Hubby” had done as his wife desired, and started to post the note, she saw on another piece of paper an impression of what he had written. It was:
“Sweet Mattie—Effie desires your company on Wednesday, to meet the Smithsons. Don’t fail to come; and, my darling, I shall have the happiness of a long walk home with you, and a sweet good-night kiss. I dare not see you often, or my all-consuming love would betray us both. But, Mattie dear, don’t fail to come.”
Harriet McEwen Kimball is responsible for this description of a paroxysmal kiss: