Which one evokes your ardent praise
All other bards above?”
And as he took her in his arms
And kissed her o’er and o’er,
She spoke, in tones of ecstasy,
“O Tommy, give me Moore!”
Some curious excuses are recorded for not kissing. In a certain Methodist church the young people were in the habit of playing games whose forfeits were kisses, but a pious old deacon was much troubled about it; he said he was not opposed to kissing if they did not kiss with “an appetite.” A woman in trying to express her contempt for a certain female friend, said: “If I was a man I would no more kiss such a woman than I would kiss a pair of tongs that had been left out over night in a snow-bank.”
Kissing experiences vary. A country damsel, describing her first kiss, told her female friend that she never knew how it happened, but the last thing she remembered was a sensation of fighting for her breath in a hot-house full of violets, with the ventilation choked by blush-roses and tu-lips.
A Western man relates his experience. “Talk about kissing! Go away! I have kissed in the North, I have kissed in the South; I have repeated the soul-stirring operation East and West; I have kissed in Texas and away down in Maine; I have kissed at Long Branch and at the Golden Gate—in fact, in every State in the Union; in every language and according to the manners and customs of every nation. I have kissed on the Mississippi and all its tributaries; but, young man, for good sound kissing, give me a full-fledged Caribou girl. When you feel the pegs drawn right through the soles of your feet, from your boots, that’s kissing, that is.”
We read of a king’s kiss that “fell like a flame,” sending through every vein love’s joy and pain. And Shakespeare speaks of two lovers whose lips were “four red roses on a stalk, and in their simple beauty kissed each other.” A country girl insisted on taking a stamp instead of a stamped envelope at the post-office. “My beau,” she said, “doesn’t like stamped envelopes. He lives away out in Colorado, and he says he never gets a chance to see me; but if I lick the stamp and stick it on, he can chew it, and it is the next thing to kissing me.” The fact is, that a young lady’s first love-kiss has the same effect on her as being electrified; it’s a great shock, but it’s soon over.