Gifts from the man to the woman are de rigueur—a survival of the old mode of barter or purchase. These gifts are generally of jewelry; but sometimes the pair exchange useful presents of body-linen, &c. At Easter the man gives the woman either a luscious sweet called “cassata,” or a “peccorella di pasta reale,” that is a lamb couchant made of almond paste, crowned with a tinsel crown, carrying a flag, and colored after nature. At the Feast of St. Peter—the 29th of July; not the same as Saints Peter and Paul—he gives keys made of flour and honey, or of almonds, or of caramel. On the 2nd of November—the day off All Souls’—he takes her sweet brown cakes with a white mortuary figure raised in high relief, as a child, or a man, or a death’s head and cross bones, or a well-defined set of ribs to symbolize a skeleton, according to the nearest relative she may have lost. But in Mazarra no one who loved his bride would give her aught in the likeness of a cat, as this would presage her speedy death. Biscuits for St. Martin’s day; gingerbread in true lovers’ knots, tough and tasteless, and sugar bambini for Christmas; huge hearts, of a rather coarse imitation of mincemeat, and sugared over, for the Feast of the Annunciation; on the day of Saints Cosmo and Damian, medlars, quinces and the saints themselves done in honey and sugar—and so on;—these are the little courtesies of the betrothal which no man who respected himself, or desired the love of her who was to be his wife, would dream of neglecting. During the time of betrothal, how long so ever it may last, the young people are never suffered to be one moment alone, nor to say anything to each other which all the world does not hear. The man may go once a week to the girl’s house; where he seats himself at the corner of the room opposite to that where she is sitting; but he may not touch her hand nor speak to her below his breath. In the country, when they cannot marry for yet awhile, they engage themselves from year to year. But they are always kept apart and rigorously watched. Formerly marriages were somewhat earlier than now. Now they are delayed until the young fellow has served his three years in the army. They used to be most general when he was twenty and she eighteen; and a proverb says that at eighteen a girl either marries or dies. The church did not sanction marriages earlier than these several ages, save in exceptional cases; and any one who assisted at the marriage of a girl below the age of eighteen, without the consent of her parents and guardians, was imprisoned for life and forfeited all he had. This law, however, was frequently broken in remote places, and especially about Palermo, where “the marriages of Monreale” have passed into a proverb. When a young girl, say of sixteen, marries and has a good childbirth, they say, “She has been to Monreale.”