Our ancestors made merry in a similar fashion on St. Valentine’s Day. So Herrick, speaking of a bride, says,—
She must no more a-maying,
Or by rosebuds divine
Who’ll be her Valentine.
Brand, who helps us to this quotation, gives an amusing extract from the Connoisseur to the same effect. “Last Friday was Valentine’s Day, and the night before I got five bay leaves, and pinned four of them to the four 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, eat it, shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it. We also wrote our lovers’ names upon bits of paper, and rolled them up in clay, and put them into water, and the first that rose up was to be our Valentine. Would you think it? Mr. Blossom was my man. I lay abed and shut my eyes all the morning till he came to our house; for I would not have seen another man before him for all the world.” The moon, “the lady moon,” has frequently been called into council about husbands from the time when she first lost her own heart to Endymion, the beautiful shepherd of Mount Latmos. Go out when the first new moon of the year first appears, and standing over the spars of a gate or stile, look on the moon and repeat as follows:—
All hail to thee, moon! all hail to thee!
Prythee, good moon, reveal to me
This night who my husband shall be.
You will certainly dream that night of your future husband. It is very important, too, that if you have a cat in the house, it should be a black one. A North Country rhyme says—
Whenever the cat or the house is black,