" "I
am not to be trifled with; so, if you refuse, I have done with you
forever." "Then be done as quick as you please, for I'll not bundle
with you nor with any other man." "Then farewell, proud girl," said
he. "Farewell, honest man," said I, and off he went sure enough.
"'I have since made inquiries about _bundling_, and find that it is
_really_ the custom here, and that they think no more harm of it,
than we do our way of a young couple sitting up together. I have
known an instance, since I have been here, of a girl's taking her
sweetheart to a neighbor's house and asking for a bed or two to
lodge in, or rather to _bundle_ in. They had company at her
father's, so that their beds were occupied; she thought no harm of
it. She and her family are respectable.
"'Grandmother says bundling was a very common thing in our part of
the country, in old times; that most of the first settlers lived in
log houses, which seldom had more than one room with a fire place;
in this room the old people slept, so if one of their girls had a
sweetheart in the winter she must either sit with him in the room
where her father and mother slept, or take him into her sleeping
room.
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