When conditions, however, are equal, and there are no overt objections to the desired marriage, the mother of the young man takes the thing in hand. She knows that her son wants to marry, because he is sullen, silent, rude, contradictious and fault-finding; because last Saturday night he hitched up the ass to the hook in the house wall, instead of stabling it as he ought, and himself passed the night out of doors; or because—in one place in Sicily—he sat on the chest, stamped his feet and kicked his heels, so that his parents, hearing the noise, might know that he was disturbed in his mind, and wanted to marry so soon as convenient. Then the mother knows what is before her, and accepts her duties as a good woman should. She dresses herself a little smartly and goes to the house of the Nina or Rosa with whom her son has fallen in love, to see what the girl is like when at home, and to find out the amount of dower likely to be given with her. She hides under her shawl a weaver’s comb, which, as soon as she is seated, she brings out, asking the girl’s mother if she can lend her one like it? This latter answers that she will look for one, and will do all she can to meet her visitor’s wishes. She then sends the daughter into another room, and the two begin the serious business of means and dowry. In olden times the girl who did not know how to weave the thread she had already spun had small chance of finding a husband, how great soever her charms or virtues. Power looms and cheap cloth have changed all this and substituted a more generalized kind of industriousness; but, all the same, she must be industrious—or have the wit to appear so—else the maternal envoy will have none of her; but leaving the house hurriedly, crosses herself and repeats thrice the Sicilian word for “Renounced.” In Modica the young man’s mother sets a broom against the girl’s house-door at night which does the same as the weaver’s comb elsewhere; and, if all other things suit, the young people are betrothed the following Saturday. And after they are betrothed the girl’s mother goes to a church at some distance from her own home, where she stands behind the door, and, according to the words said by the first persons who pass through, foretells the happiness or the unhappiness of the marriage set on foot.