mpany slips, or the ring falls in the house, or one of the candles on
the altar takes fire or goes out, something unlucky is to be expected,
as these are bad omens; that if two sisters are married the same
evening, the younger must suffer; finally, that marriages between
relatives always turn out badly.

In addition, it must not be believed that a marriage can be made, or is
made, with any one without due regard being had to the relations and
spirit of the family of the bride or groom. The intimate, unwritten
history of Sicily and the Sicilians is full of facts that show how
between natives of this town and that, of this ward and that, and
between the partisans of different factions, marriages cannot, and ought
not, and will not, be made. Municipal and country contentions kept many
parts of Sicily in such enmity that they quarrelled even about the thing
most sacred to Sicilians--religion. It was not enough that hatred grew
up between the natives of two different but neighboring localities: it
was often born and perpetuated "between those whom one wall and one
fosse shut in," and assumed considerable proportions. Thus we see as
far back as the fifteenth century the inhabitants of a certain "fifth"
(Palermo was divided into five wards) so hostile to those of another
ward that the intervention of the senate was necessary in order to
obtain from King Alfonso (in 1448) supplementary laws to obviate the
evil.[28] In like manner the members of different confraternities are
often unfriendly. In Modica it is a rare thing for a man devoted to St.
George to marry a woman devoted to St. Peter. An excellent young lady of
Syracuse, devoted to St. Philip and engaged to a distinguished young man
of the same city who was a member of the confraternity of the Holy
Ghost, a few days before the wedding broke her engagement because on
visiting her betrothed, who was ill, she found hanging above his head a
picture of the Holy Ghost, which she tore down and broke to pieces in
anger and scorn.

Men engaged on the sea do not marry into families employed on the land.
The sailors consider themselves, and are, better and milder than other
classes, as is shown by the criminal cases[29] and the words and phrases
which they use (especially those of the _Kalsa_ of Palermo). Then there
are the social differences, which are an obstacle to many marriages. We
do not speak of the large cities, where certain prejudices are more or
less overlooked; but in th