The eight to ten couples belonging to each wedding-party are enclosed in a ring of by-standers, each rival band of music playing away with heroic disregard for the scorched ears of the audience. “Walser!” calls out the first group; “Polka!” roars the second—for it is a point of honor that each party display a noble independence in taking its own line of action; and if, out of mere coincidence, two of the bands happen to strike up the self-same tune, one of them will be sure to change abruptly to something totally different, as soon as aware of the unfortunate mistake—the caterwauling effect produced by this system baffling all description. “This is nothing at all,” said the pastor, from whose garden I was overlooking the scene, laughing at the dismay with which I endeavored to stop my ears. “Sometimes we have eight or ten weddings at a time, each with its own fiddlers—that is something worth hearing indeed!”
The rest of this second day is spent much in the same way as the former one, only this time it is at the house of the bridegroom’s parents.
In some places it is usual on this day for the young couple, accompanied by the wedding-party, to drive back to the house of the bride’s parents in order to fetch her truhe—viz., the painted wooden coffer in which her trousseau has been stored. The young wife remains sitting on the cart, while her husband goes in and fetches the coffer. Then he returns once more, and addresses the following speech to his mother-in-law: “It is not unknown to me, dearest mother, that you have prepared various articles, at the toil of your hands, for your dearest child, for which may you be heartily thanked; and may God in future continue to bless your labor, and give you health and strength to accomplish the same.
“But as it has become known to me that the coffer containing your dear child’s effects has got a lock, and as to every lock there must needs be a key, so have I come to beg you to give me this key, in order that we may be enabled to take what we require from out the coffer.”[18]
Among the customs attached to this first day of wedded life is that of breaking the distaff. If the young matron can succeed in doing so at one stroke across her knee, she will be sure to have strong and healthy sons born of her wedlock; if not, then she has but girls to expect.
The third day is called the finishing-up day, each family assembling its own friends and relations to consume the provisions remaining over from the former banquets, and at the same time to wash up the cooking utensils and crockery, restoring whatever has been borrowed from neighbors in the shape of plates, jugs, etc.—the newly married couple joining the entertainment, now at the one, now at the other house. This day is the close of the wedding festivities, which have kept both families in a state of bustle and turmoil for fully a week. Everything now returns to every-day order and regularity, the young couple usually taking up their abode in a small back room of the house of the young man’s parents, putting off till the following spring the important business of building their own house. Dancing and feasting are now at an end, and henceforth the earnest of life begins, though it is usual to say that “only after they have licked a stone of salt together” can a proper understanding exist between husband and wife.
[CHAPTER XV.]
THE SAXONS: BIRTH AND INFANCY.
By-and-by, when a few months have passed over the heads of the newly married couple, and the young matron becomes aware that the prophecies pointed at by the broken distaff and the doll’s cradle are likely to come true, she is carefully instructed as to the conduct she must observe in order to insure the well-being of herself and her child.