the fire.[283] On the same day peasants in the department of Loiret used to run about the sowed fields with burning torches in their hands, while they adjured the field-mice to quit the wheat on pain of having their whiskers burned.[284] In the department of Ain the great fires of straw and faggots which are kindled in the fields at this time are or were supposed to destroy the nests of the caterpillars.[285] At Verges, a lonely village surrounded by forests between the Jura and the Combe d’Ain, the torches used at this season were kindled in a peculiar manner.  The young people climbed to the top of a mountain, where they placed three nests of straw in three trees.  These nests being then set on fire, torches made of dry lime-wood were lighted at them, and the merry troop descended the mountain to their flickering light, and went to every house in the village, demanding roasted peas and obliging all couples who had been married within the year to dance.[286] 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.[287] In the peninsula of La Manche the Norman peasants used to spend almost the whole night of the first Sunday in Lent rushing about the country with lighted torches for the purpose, as they supposed, of driving away the moles and field-mice; fires were also kindled on some of the dolmens.[288]

[Bonfires on the first Sunday in Lent in Germany and Austria; burning the witch; burning discs thrown into the air; burning wheels rolled down hill; bonfires on the first Sunday in Lent in Switzerland.]

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.  These they carried to an eminence and piled up round a tall, slim beech-tree, to which a piece of wood was fastened at right angles to form a cross.  The structure was known as the “hut” or “castle.”  Fire was set to it and the young people marched round the blazing “castle” bareheaded, each carrying a lighted torch and praying aloud.  Sometimes a straw-man was burned in the “hut.”  People observed the direction in which the smoke blew