No. 744
Crime, Eccentricity, and the Sporting Life in 19th Century America.
April 10, 2024

"He Loves Me; He Loves Me Not."

How Marie Played a Romantic Trick on Her Lover and Brought Him to Time.
April 10, 2024
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Early American Crime - 2/7/2019
Wrestling Match on a Canadian Steamer. | Turning the Tables.

"He Loves Me; He Loves Me Not."

He Loves You Here's a young girl of romantic temperament who yet would not sit like Patience on a monument smiling at grief or plan In a green and yellow melancholy until her lover made up his mind to declare his earnest intentions. Oh, no; she was one of your right sort who didn't believe in picking a rose to pieces leaf by leaf in a garden while interrogating blind lock whether he loved her or loved her not. She Was a New Orleans girl and her name was Marie Ravineau. He was a home pointer and a good hearted fellow, with everything admirable about him except that he would not talk right out. His name was Henry L. Jackson.

Well, on the 30th ult., Henry was sitting on a swinging scaffold made by a horizontally placed ladder hung from the roof by ropes attached to either end. He was painting the front of a four story home. Marie went up to that roof, swung herself down the rope to the ladder and with a knife began to hack at the ropes.

“Does he love me?” said she, "Oh, say you do.”

But Henry didn't cackle worth a cent. Then she Out a strand of the rope, sayIng, "He loved me," then another strand, "He loves me not," and thus alternating her assertions until there remained but one little strand. Then the painter eagerly protested his love, and she fell in his arms. The last strand broke, and the pair clutching the rounds of the now vertical ladder were suspended inn mld-air ten minutes before they could be released.

The painter’s,mind seems quite unbalanced by the shock but Marie vows they shall not commit him to the lunatic asylum until she is married. That's what she started out to do and she's going to accomplish it. That's a woman that trifles will not throw off, you bet.


National Police Gazette, June 10, 1882.