WALT WHITMAN.

=St. Valentine’s Day=

February 14

Custom decrees that on this day the young shall exchange missives in which the love of the sender is told in verses, pictures, and sentiments.  No reason beyond a guess can be given to connect St. Valentine with these customs.  He was a Christian martyr, about 270 A.D., while the practice of sending valentines had its origin in the heathen worship of Juno.  It is Cupid’s day, and no boy or girl needs any encouragement to make the most of it.

=WHO BEGAN IT?=

BY OLIVE THORNE

There’s one thing we know positively, that St. Valentine didn’t begin this fourteenth of February excitement; but who did is a question not so easy to answer.  I don’t think any one would have begun it if he could have known what the simple customs of his day would have grown into, or could even have imagined the frightful valentines that disgrace our shops to-day.

It began, for us, with our English ancestors, who used to assemble on the eve of St. Valentine’s day, put the names of all the young maidens promiscuously in a box, and let each bachelor draw one out.  The damsel whose name fell to his lot became his valentine for the year.  He wore her name in his bosom or on his sleeve, and it was his duty to attend her and protect her.  As late as the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries this custom was very popular, even among the upper classes.

But the wiseacres have traced the custom farther back.  Some of them think it was begun by the ancient Romans, who had on the fourteenth or fifteenth of February a festival in honor of Lupercus, “the destroyer of wolves”—­a wolf-destroyer being quite worthy of honor in those wild days, let me tell you.  At this festival it was the custom, among other curious things, to pair off the young men and maidens in the same chance way, and with the same result of a year’s attentions.

Even this is not wholly satisfactory.  Who began it among the Romans? becomes the next interesting question.  One old writer says it was brought to Rome from Arcadia sixty years before the Trojan war (which Homer wrote about, you know).  I’m sure that’s far enough back to satisfy anybody.  The same writer also says that the Pope tried to abolish it in the fifth century, but he succeeded only in sending it down to us in the name of St. Valentine instead of Lupercus.

[Illustration:  FOR THIS WAS ON SAINT VALENTINE’S DAY]

Our own ancestry in England and Scotland have observed some very funny customs within the last three centuries.  At one time valentines were fashionable among the nobility, and, while still selected by lot, it became the duty of a gentleman to give to the lady who fell to his lot a handsome present.  Pieces of jewelry costing thousands of dollars were not unusual, though smaller things, as gloves, were more common.