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Updated: June 16, 2025
Inside the low log building certain preparations progressed, mummeries peculiar to the tribesmen, not to be described, strange, grotesque, sickening, horrible. A few donned fantastic uniforms cut out from colored oil-cloths. They placed upon their heads plumed hats of shapes such as white men do not create.
A family of daughters were born to them, who, with their mother, continued nominally Protestant; but after his death, when the house was filled with Romish priests, performing for a week together their mummeries over the corpse, these poor females had become a prey to the subtle perversions of the ecclesiastics, and had openly apostatized, all save my new friend, who with a better informed mind and more scriptural knowledge withstood their sophistries, until sundry mock miracles performed by means of saintly relics and a well-contrived nocturnal visitation from the ghost of her father whom she fondly loved, had so unnerved and frightened her that she too fell a prey to the delusion.
These "mummeries" had been brought by William of Orange from the Netherlands, at the express request of the Elector, on the ground that such matters were much better understood in the provinces than in Germany. Such is a slight sketch of the revels by which this ill-fated Bartholomew marriage was celebrated.
"After the death of the Dauphin," says this chronicler, "King Charles and his Queen were full of such desolate grief that the doctors, fearing the weakness and feeble constitution of the King, were of opinion that excess of sorrow might be prejudicial to his health; they therefore advised as many distractions as possible, and suggested that the princes at court should invent new pastimes, dances, and mummeries to give pleasure to the King and Queen, which being done, the Monseigneur d'Orléans devised a masquerade with dances, in which he danced with such gaiety and so played the fool that the Queen thought he was making merry because he was nearer the throne of France, seeing that the Dauphin was dead.
Do not, my dear son, for one moment imagine that I wish to inculcate the idea that, as I approach my Maker, I profess to believe all those mummeries that I have hitherto dared to disbelieve and dispute. You know that I never joined in Saint Athanasius's Creed. All such unchristian denunciations I ever held, and I still hold, to be blasphemous impositions.
I have a shrewd suspicion that the motives which prompted our youthful actions are not very different from those now inciting children of a larger growth to band together, blackball their friends, crown queens, and perform other senseless mummeries, such as having the weathercock of a departed meeting-house brought in during a banquet, and dressing restaurant waiters in knickerbockers for “one night only.”
Now the good man, swathed in his heavy clothing, found himself quite worn out with these exercises, in which he was constrained to participate either in giving her his hand, when she performed the vaults of the Moorish girl, or in holding the lighted fagot for her, when she had a fancy to do the torchlight dance; and in spite of his sciaticas, accretions, and rheumatisms, he was obliged to smile and say to her some gentle words and gallantries after all the evolutions, mummeries, and comic pantomimes, which she indulged in to divert herself; for he loved her so madly that if she had asked him for an impossibility he would have sought one for her immediately.
All situations have their discomforts; and there are times when we all wish that our lot had been cast in some other line of life, or in some other place." With regard to a proposed coat of arms for Hooghly College, he says "I do not see why the mummeries of European heraldry should be introduced into any part of our Indian system. Heraldry is not a science which has any eternal rules.
For years I practiced these senseless mummeries, and if there were any virtue, in them, I should, most certainly have discovered it. But I know full well, and my reader knows that they cannot satisfy the restless yearnings of the immortal mind. They may delude the vulgar, but they cannot dispel the darkness of the tomb, they cannot lead a soul to Christ.
There was something, as we have observed, repulsive in the manner of the stranger, which prevented Morton from opening the conversation, and he himself seemed to have no desire to talk, until, on a sudden, he abruptly demanded, "What has your father's son to do with such profane mummeries as I find you this day engaged in?"
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