SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS, MANNERS, AND CUSTOMS The essential principles in the drama of human life are ever the same although its outward aspect changes with changing circumstances. But in some ages events develop more rapidly than in others under the urgency of peculiar conditions. In colonial Virginia the story was told over and over again before the final fall of the curtain. Scenes shifted with wonderful rapidity. The curtain, in mimic drama, is usually rung down at the church door after the early or late wooing and marriage; but in Virginia in the eighteenth century this was only the first in a drama of five or more acts. The early death of the first bride left a vacancy speedily filled by new and successive unions with new associations and combinations. Five times was not an unusual number for men to remarry. This meant five wooings, five weddings, five "infairs," many births (varying in number from one to twenty-six), five funerals,--all to be included in thirty adult years more or less. Then, too, there were five tombstones to be erected and as many epitaphs to be composed--no two of which to be alike. One wife (usually the first) almost exhausts the vocabulary of adoring affection, another's piety is emphasized, another "lived peacably with her neighbors"; each one was "as a wife dutiful." "Obedient" was a word dear to the colonial husband. We have no authority for supposing that the officiating clergyman at a funeral was ever actually retained for the ensuing nuptials of the bereaved. Initial steps in that direction were never taken in Virginia until a husband or wife was well under the sod. Divorce being unknown, unthinkable indeed, husbands and wives were united in bonds indissoluble, until death did them part. But when it did--why, then there was no reasonable cause for delay. It was not at all unusual for the new husband to offer for probate the will of his predecessor. Man in those days did not believe he was made to mourn, at least not for maid or matron, nor that charming women were created to weep in widow's weeds beyond the decent period of two months. The little hands were firmly drawn from their pressure upon the tearful eyes, tucked comfortably under a new, strong arm, and the widow's little baronry stitched to a new sleeve. There were exceptions, of course, but not many. When one of the husbands of Mary Washington's charming nieces (the Gregory girls) lay mortally ill, he looked up with anguish at the lovely young wife bending over him, and implored her to keep herself for him. She readily promised never again to marry, and kept her promise. Another, left a widow, essayed to follow the sublime example of her sister. One of the masterful Thorntons sued for twenty years, but won at last. The statute of limitations in Cupid's court held for twenty years only in colonial Virginia.