In Southern’s “Maid’s Last Prayer,” the heroine says: “Marry him I must, and wear my wedding-ring upon my thumb too, that I’m resolved.”[136] These thumb-weddings were said to be introduced from the East[137]; and Chardin reports a form of marriage in Ceylon, by the binding together of the thumbs of the contracting parties;[138] as, according to the classics, the thumbs were bound together in the rite of blood-covenanting.[139] Indeed, the selection of the ring-finger for the wedding-covenant has commonly been attributed to the relation of that finger to the heart as the blood-centre, and as the seat of life. “Aulus Gellius tells us, that Appianus asserts, in his Egyptian books, that a very delicate nerve runs from the fourth finger of the left hand to the heart, on which account this finger is used for the marriage-ring.” Macrobius says that in Roman espousals the woman put the covenant ring “on the third finger of her left hand [not counting the thumb], because it was believed that a nerve ran from that finger to the heart.” And as to the significance of this point, it has been said: “The _fact_ [of the nerve connection with the heart] has nothing to do with the question: that the ancients _believed_ it, is all we require to know.”[140] Among the Copts of Egypt, both the blood and the ring have their part in the covenant of marriage. Two rings are employed, one for the bride and one for the bridegroom. At the door of the bridegroom’s house, as the bride approaches it, a lamb or a sheep is slaughtered; and the bride must have a care to step over the covenanting-blood as she enters the door, to join the bridegroom. It is after this ceremony, that the two contracting parties exchange the rings, which are as the tokens of the covenant of blood.[141] In Borneo, among the Tring Dayaks, the marriage ceremony includes the smearing with a bloody sword, the clasped hands of the bride and groom, in conjunction with an invoking of the protecting spirits.[142] In this case, the wedding-ring would seem to be a bond of blood. Again, in Little Russia, the bride gives to the bridegroom a covenanting draught in “a cup of wine, in which a ring has been put”;[143] as if in that case the wine and the blood-bond of the covenant were commingled in a true _assiratum_.[144] That this latter custom is an ancient one, would seem to be indicated by the indirect reference to it in Sir Walter Scott’s ballad of “The Noble Moringer,” a mediæval lay; where the long absent knight returns from the Holy Land, just in time to be at the wedding-feast of his enticed wife. He appears unrecognized at the feast, as a poor palmer. A cup of wine is sent to him by the bride. “It was the noble Moringer that dropped amid the wine A bridal ring of burning gold so costly and so fine: Now listen, gentles, to my song, it tells you but the sooth, ’Twas with that very ring of gold he pledged his bridal truth.”