the bonfire.  While the bonfires blazed up, it was customary in some parts of Switzerland to propel burning discs of wood through the air by means of the same simple machinery which is used for the purpose in Swabia.  Each lad tried to send his disc fizzing and flaring through the darkness as far as possible, and in discharging it he mentioned the name of the person to whose honour it was dedicated.  But in Praettigau the words uttered in launching the fiery discs referred to the abundance which was apparently expected to follow the performance of the ceremony.  Among them were, “Grease in the pan, corn in the fan, and the plough in the earth!"[297]

[Connexion of these bonfires with the custom of “carrying out Death;” effigies burnt on Shrove Tuesday.]

It seems hardly possible to separate from these bonfires, kindled on the first Sunday in Lent, the fires in which, about the same season, the effigy called Death is burned as part of the ceremony of “carrying out Death.”  We have seen that at Spachendorf, in Austrian Silesia, on the morning of Rupert’s Day (Shrove Tuesday?), a straw-man, dressed in a fur coat and a fur cap, is laid in a hole outside the village and there burned, and that while it is blazing every one seeks to snatch a fragment of it, which he fastens to a branch of the highest tree in his garden or buries in his field, believing that this will make the crops to grow better.  The ceremony is known as the “burying of Death."[298] Even when the straw-man is not designated as Death, the meaning of the observance is probably the same; for the name Death, as I have tried to shew, does not express the original intention of the ceremony.  At Cobern in the Eifel Mountains the lads make up a straw-man on Shrove Tuesday.  The effigy is formally tried and accused of having perpetrated all the thefts that have been committed in the neighbourhood throughout the year.  Being condemned to death, the straw-man is led through the village, shot, and burned upon a pyre.  They dance round the blazing pile, and the last bride must leap over it.[299] In Oldenburg on the evening of Shrove Tuesday people used to make long bundles of straw, which they set on fire, and then ran about the fields waving them, shrieking, and singing wild songs.  Finally they burned a straw-man on the field.[300] In the district of Duesseldorf the straw-man burned on Shrove Tuesday was made of an unthreshed sheaf of corn.[301] On the first Monday after the spring equinox the urchins of Zurich drag a straw-man on a little cart through the streets, while at the same time the girls carry about a May-tree.  When vespers ring, the straw-man is burned.[302] In the district of Aachen on Ash Wednesday a man used to be encased in peas-straw and taken to an appointed place.  Here he slipped quietly out of his straw casing, which was then burned, the children thinking that it was the man who was being burned.[303] In the Val di Ledro (Tyrol) on the last day of the Carnival a figure is made up of straw and brushwood and then burned.  The figure is called the Old Woman, and the ceremony “burning the Old Woman."[304]