For when May Day comes, the seed has long
been committed to the earth; and when November opens, the harvest
has long been reaped and garnered, the fields lie bare, the
fruit-trees are stripped, and even the yellow leaves are fast
fluttering to the ground. Yet the first of May and the first of
November mark turning-points of the year in Europe; the one ushers
in the genial heat and the rich vegetation of summer, the other
heralds, if it does not share, the cold and barrenness of winter.
Now these particular points of the year, as has been well pointed
out by a learned and ingenious writer, while they are of
comparatively little moment to the European husbandman, do deeply
concern the European herdsman; for it is on the approach of summer
that he drives his cattle out into the open to crop the fresh grass,
and it is on the approach of winter that he leads them back to the
safety and shelter of the stall. Accordingly it seems not improbable
that the Celtic bisection of the year into two halves at the
beginning of May and the beginning of November dates from a time
when the Celts were mainly a pastoral people, dependent for their
subsistence on their herds, and when accordingly the great epochs of
the year for them were the days on which the cattle went forth from
the homestead in early summer and returned to it again in early
winter.
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