he fire. Instantly the vines
blazed up, flooding the room with brightness; and as the yule-log glowed
and reddened everybody cried

Cacho-fio,
Bouto-fio!
Alegre! Alegre!

again and again--as though the whole of them together of a sudden had
gone merry-mad!

In the midst of this triumphant rejoicing the bowl from which the
libation had been poured was filled afresh with _vin cue_ and was passed
from hand to hand and lip to lip--beginning with the little Tounin, and
so upward in order of seniority until it came last of all to the old
man--and from it each drank to the new fire of the new year.

Anciently, this ceremony of the yule-log lighting was universal in
Provence, and it is almost universal still; sometimes with a less
elaborate ritual than I have described, but yet substantially the same:
always with the libation, always with an invocation, always with the
rejoicing toast to the new fire. But in modern times--within the last
century or so--another custom in part has supplanted it in Marseille and
Aix and in some few other towns. This is the lighting of candles at
midnight in front of the creche; a ceremony, it will be observed, in
which new fire still bears the most important part.

One of my Aix friends, the poet Joachim Gasquet, has described to me the
Christmas Eve customs which were observed in his own home: the Gasquet
bakery, in the Rue de la Cepede, that has been handed down from father
to son through so many hundreds of years that even its owners cannot
tell certainly whether it was in the fourteenth or the fifteenth century
that their family legend of good baking had its rise. As Monsieur
Auguste, the _contre-maitre_ of the bakery, opened the great stone door
of the oven that I might peer into its hot depths, an historical
cross-reference came into my mind that made me realize its high
antiquity. Allowing for difference of longitude, the _contre-maitre_ who
was Monsieur Auguste's remote predecessor was lifting the morning's
baking out of that oven at the very moment when Columbus saw through
the darkness westward the lights of a new world!

In the Gasquet family it was the custom to eat the Great Supper in the
oven room: because that was the heart, the sanctuary, of the house; the
place consecrated by the toil which gave the family its livelihood. On
the supper-table there was always a wax figure of the Infant Christ, and
this was carried just before midnight to the living-room, off