Hard pressed as I am for space, I must find some to say, at any rate, just a few words about Wendish marriage customs. For its gaiety, and noise, and lavish hospitality, and protracted merriment, its finery and its curious ways, the Wendish wedding has become proverbial throughout Germany. Were I to detail all its quaint little touches, all its peculiar observances, each one pregnant with peculiar mystic meaning, all its humours and all its fun, I should have to give it an article by itself. It is a curious mixture of ancient and modern superstition and Christianity, diplomacy and warfare. The bride is still ostensibly carried off by force. Only a short time ago the bridegroom and his men were required to wear swords in token of warfare and conquest. But all the formal negotiation is done by diplomacy--very cautiously, very carefully, as if one were feeling his way. First comes an old woman, the _schotta_, to clear the ground. After that the _druzba_, the best man, appears on the scene--to inquire about pigs, or buckwheat, or millet, or whatever it may be, and incidentally also about the lovely Hilzicka, whom his friend Janko is rather thinking of paying his addresses to--the fact being all the while that long since Janko and Hilzicka have, on the sly, arranged between themselves that they are to be man and wife. But observe that in Wendland girls may propose as well as men; and that the bridegroom, like the bride, wears his "little wreath of rue"--_if he be an honest man_, in token of his virtue. The girl and her parents visit the suitor's house quite unexpectedly. And there and then only does the young lady openly decide. If she sits down in the house, that means "Yes." And forthwith preparations are busily set on foot. Custom requires that the bride should give up dancing and gaiety and all that, leave off wearing red, and stitch away at her _trousseau_, while her parents kill the fatted calf. Starve themselves as they will at other times, at a wedding they must be liberal like _parvenus_. Towards this hospitality, it is true, their friends and neighbours contribute, sending butter and milk, and the like, just before the wedding, as well as making presents of money and other articles to the young people at the feast itself. But we have not yet got to that by a long way. The young man, too, has his preparations to make. He has to send out the _braska_, the "bidder," in his gay dress, to deliver invitations. How people would stare in this country, were they to see a _braska_ making his rounds, with a wreath on his hat, one or two coloured handkerchiefs dangling showily from different parts of his coat, besides any quantity of gay ribbons and tinsel, and a herald's staff covered with diminutive bunting! Then there are the banns to be published, and on the Sunday of the second time of asking, the bride and bridegroom alike are expected to attend the Holy Communion, and afterwards to go through a regular examination--in Bible,