from the fire.  If it blew towards the corn-fields, it was a sign that the harvest would be abundant.  On the same day, in some parts of the Eifel, a great wheel was made of straw and dragged by three horses to the top of a hill.  Thither the village boys marched at nightfall, set fire to the wheel, and sent it rolling down the slope.  Two lads followed it with levers to set it in motion again, in case it should anywhere meet with a check.  At Oberstattfeld the wheel had to be provided by the young man who was last married.[289] About Echternach in Luxemburg the same ceremony is called “burning the witch”; while it is going on, the older men ascend the heights and observe what wind is blowing, for that is the wind which will prevail the whole year.[290] At Voralberg in the Tyrol, on the first Sunday in Lent, a slender young fir-tree is surrounded with a pile of straw and firewood.  To the top of the tree is fastened a human figure called the “witch,” made of old clothes and stuffed with gunpowder.  At night the whole is set on fire and boys and girls dance round it, swinging torches and singing rhymes in which the words “corn in the winnowing-basket, the plough in the earth” may be distinguished.[291] In Swabia on the first Sunday in Lent a figure called the “witch” or the “old wife” or “winter’s grandmother” is made up of clothes and fastened to a pole.  This is stuck in the middle of a pile of wood, to which fire is applied.  While the “witch” is burning, the young people throw blazing discs into the air.  The discs are thin round pieces of wood, a few inches in diameter, with notched edges to imitate the rays of the sun or stars.  They have a hole in the middle, by which they are attached to the end of a wand.  Before the disc is thrown it is set on fire, the wand is swung to and fro, and the impetus thus communicated to the disc is augmented by dashing the rod sharply against a sloping board.  The burning disc is thus thrown off, and mounting high into the air, describes a long fiery curve before it reaches the ground.  A single lad may fling up forty or fifty of these discs, one after the other.  The object is to throw them as high as possible.  The wand by which they are hurled must, at least in some parts of Swabia, be of hazel.  Sometimes the lads also leap over the fire brandishing lighted torches of pine-wood.  The charred embers of the burned “witch” and discs are taken home and planted in the flaxfields the same night, in the belief that they will keep vermin from the fields.[292] At Wangen, near Molsheim in Baden, a like custom is observed on the first Sunday in Lent.  The young people kindle a bonfire on the crest of the mountain above the village; and the burning discs which they hurl into the air are said to present in the darkness the aspect of a continual shower of falling stars.  When the supply of discs is exhausted and the bonfire begins to burn low, the boys light torches and run with them at full speed down one or other of the three