These are not all the superstitious beliefs relating to marriage, which extend so far as to ordain that if, for example, the bride or one of the company slips, or the ring falls in the house, or one of the candles on the altar takes fire or goes out, something unlucky is to be expected, as these are bad omens; that if two sisters are married the same evening, the younger must suffer; finally, that marriages between relatives always turn out badly. In addition, it must not be believed that a marriage can be made, or is made, with any one without due regard being had to the relations and spirit of the family of the bride or groom. The intimate, unwritten history of Sicily and the Sicilians is full of facts that show how between natives of this town and that, of this ward and that, and between the partisans of different factions, marriages cannot, and ought not, and will not, be made. Municipal and country contentions kept many parts of Sicily in such enmity that they quarrelled even about the thing most sacred to Sicilians--religion. It was not enough that hatred grew up between the natives of two different but neighboring localities: it was often born and perpetuated "between those whom one wall and one fosse shut in," and assumed considerable proportions. Thus we see as far back as the fifteenth century the inhabitants of a certain "fifth" (Palermo was divided into five wards) so hostile to those of another ward that the intervention of the senate was necessary in order to obtain from King Alfonso (in 1448) supplementary laws to obviate the evil.[28] In like manner the members of different confraternities are often unfriendly. In Modica it is a rare thing for a man devoted to St. George to marry a woman devoted to St. Peter. An excellent young lady of Syracuse, devoted to St. Philip and engaged to a distinguished young man of the same city who was a member of the confraternity of the Holy Ghost, a few days before the wedding broke her engagement because on visiting her betrothed, who was ill, she found hanging above his head a picture of the Holy Ghost, which she tore down and broke to pieces in anger and scorn.