In former times it was customary to take the boys of the parish on this round, and beat them at every landmark, in order to impress upon their memories its precise position. More recently the boys are permitted to carry willow wands peeled white, and with these to beat the landmarks. The later plan is certainly more satisfactory to the boys, and it is quite as likely to impress their memories. Formerly this ceremony was accompanied by religious services, in which the clergyman invoked curses on him who “transgresseth the bounds and doles of his neighbor,” and blessings on him who regarded the landmarks.[488] It has been suggested that this fixing and honoring of the landmarks by an annual festival goes back to the Roman Terminalia, in the days of Numa, but there is reason to believe that it was far earlier than that. There are traces of it in primitive times, among various primitive peoples. In Russia, the Cossacks long had a custom somewhat like this, in the case of a disputed boundary line. When the boundary had been formally determined, all the boys of the two contiguous stanitsas, or land divisions, were collected, and driven by the people along the frontier line. “At each landmark a number of boys were soundly whipped and allowed to run home,” in order that in later years they might be able to testify as to the spot where that landmark stood. In cases where the boys’ memory failed to be accurate, an arbiter was chosen from the older inhabitants, and sworn to act honestly to the best of his knowledge; and his decision was accepted as final.[489] A similar custom of beating the bounds under a “selectman” of the town has existed in portions of New England until recently, and perhaps it has not yet died out there. Thus Ralph Waldo Emerson speaks of the selectmen of Concord perambulating the bounds of its township “once in five years,” up to 1858.[490] Is there not a survival of this old custom in the habit of striking a child on his birthday as many blows as he has passed years, when he comes to the threshold of another year of his life? Mile-posts would seem to have been originally landmarks separating the public way from private lands, being placed at regular distances along the road for convenience of measurement and locating. They marked the threshold of the “king’s highway” to and from his capital in the Roman empire, as trees marked the border-lines of the principal roads in Greece. 3. NATIONAL BORDERS. Stone pillars marking the exact boundaries of states or nations, whether settled by a joint commission or by a conqueror’s fiat, are not a modern invention, although they are in use to-day. They are of old time, and of primitive ages. And these boundaries of a country are by their very nature its thresholds.