In Berry, a
district of Central France, it appears that bonfires are not lighted
on this day, but when the sun has set the whole population of the
villages, armed with blazing torches of straw, disperse over the
country and scour the fields, the vineyards, and the orchards. Seen
from afar, the multitude of moving lights, twinkling in the
darkness, appear like will-o'-the-wisps chasing each other across
the plains, along the hillsides, and down the valleys. While the men
wave their flambeaus about the branches of the fruit-trees, the
women and children tie bands of wheaten-straw round the tree-trunks.
The effect of the ceremony is supposed to be to avert the various
plagues from which the fruits of the earth are apt to suffer; and
the bands of straw fastened round the stems of the trees are
believed to render them fruitful.
In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland at the same season similar
customs have prevailed. Thus in the Eifel Mountains, Rhenish
Prussia, on the first Sunday in Lent young people used to collect
straw and brushwood from house to house.
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