[38] In Greenwich, New Jersey, it was in vogue in 1816. In the
state of New York this custom came under judicial cognizance in the year
1804, when the supreme court held, that although bundling was admitted
to be the custom in some parts of the state, it being proven that the
parents of the girl, for whose seduction the suit was brought,
countenanced her practicing it, they had no right to complain, or ask
satisfaction for the consequences, which, the court say, "_naturally
followed it_!"[39]
APPENDIX I.
BUNDLING.
[From _The Yankee_ of August 13, 1828, published at Portland, Maine, and
edited by John Neal.]
By Rochefoucault, in accounting for the populousness of Massachusetts,
the New Englanders are charged with bundling.
By Chastelleux, whose book I am not able to refer to now, the charge is
repeated, and by half a score of other honest, good natured people, who
have made books about the New World.
But, if you enquire into the business, you are pretty sure to be told,
inquire where you may, that bundling is not known _there_, but somewhere
further back in the woods, or further _down east_. Nay, while in every
part of the United States the multitude speak of bundling as the habit
of their neighbors, either east, west, north, or south, where the
witches of the country were _located_ about a century ago by the
grandfathers of this generation, I, myself, though I have taken trouble
enough to learn the truth, have never yet been able to meet with a case
of bundling--of bundling proper, I should say--in the United States, nor
with but one trustworthy individual who had ever met with so much as one
case, and he had met with _but_ one, for which he would give his word.
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