steal Mistress Bride."

Poor-spirited creatures Connecticut maids must have been to endure
meekly such an ungallant custom and such ungallant lovers.

The sport of stealing "Mistress Bride," a curious survival of the old
savage bridals of many peoples, lingered long in the Connecticut valley.
A company of young men, usually composed of slighted ones who had not
been invited to the wedding, rushed in after the marriage ceremony,
seized the bride, carried her to a waiting carriage, or lifted her up on
a pillion, and rode to the country tavern. The groom with his friends
followed, and usually redeemed the bride by furnishing a supper to the
stealers. The last bride stolen in Hadley was Mrs. Job Marsh, in the
year 1783. To this day, however, in certain localities in Rhode Island,
the young men of the neighborhood invade the bridal chamber and pull the
bride downstairs, and even out-of-doors, thus forcing the husband to
follow to her rescue. If the room or house-door be locked against their
invasion, the rough visitors break the lock.

In England throughout the eighteenth century the grotesque belief
prevailed that if a widow were "married in Her Smock without any Clothes
or Head Gier on," the husband would be exempt from paying any of his
new wife's ante-nuptial debts; and many records of such debt-evading
marriages appear. In New England, it was thought if the bride were
married "in her shift on the king's highway," a creditor could follow
her person no farther in pursuit of his debt. Many such eccentric
"smock-marriages" took place, generally (with some regard for modesty)
occurring in the evening. Later the bride was permitted to stand in a
closet.

Mr. William C. Prime, in his delightful book, "Along New England Roads,"
gives an account of such a marriage. In Newfane, Vt., in February, 1789,
Major Moses Joy married Widow Hannah Ward; the bride stood, with no
clothing on, within a closet, and held out her hand to the major through
a diamond-shaped hole in the door, and the ceremony was thus performed.
She then appeared resplendent in wedding attire, which the gallant major
had thoughtfully deposited in the closet for her assumption. Mr. Prime
tells also of a marriage in which the bride, entirely unclad, left her
room by a window at night, and standing on the top round of a high
ladder donned her wedding garments, and thus put off the obligations of
the old life.

In Hall's "History of Eastern Vermont," we read of a