Thus early did this cunning and ingenious people
display a shrewdness at making a bargain, which has ever since
distinguished them, and a strict adherence to the good old vulgar maxim
about 'buying a pig in a poke.'
"To this sagacious custom, therefore, do I chiefly attribute the
unparalleled increase of the Yanokie or Yankee tribe; for it is a
certain fact, well authenticated by court records and parish registers,
that wherever the practice of bundling prevailed, there was an amazing
number of sturdy brats annually born unto the state, without the license
of the law, or the benefit of clergy. Neither did the irregularity of
their birth operate in the least to their disparagement. On the
contrary, they grew up a long-sided, raw-boned, hardy race of whoreson
whalers, wood cutters, fishermen, and peddlers; and strapping corn-fed
wenches, who by their united efforts tended marvellously towards
populating those notable tracts of country called Nantucket, Piscataway,
and Cape Cod."
Hear, also, that learned, but audacious and unscrupulous divine, the
Rev. Samuel Peters, who thus discourseth at length upon the custom of
bundling in Connecticut, and other parts of New England. After admitting
that "the women of Connecticut are strictly virtuous, and to be compared
to the prude rather than the European polite lady," he says:
"Notwithstanding the modesty of the females is such that it would be
accounted the greatest rudeness for a gentleman to speak before a lady
of a garter, knee, or leg, yet it is thought but a piece of civility to
ask her to _bundle_; a custom as old as the first settlement in 1634.
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