g._]

Lovers try omens on this eve, as they do in Scotland on Hallowe'en.
If you sleep with one stocking on, you will find on May morning in
the toe a hair the color of your sweetheart's. Girls try to find
out the temperament of their husbands-to-be by keeping a linen
thread for three days near an image of the Madonna, and at midnight
on May Eve pulling it apart, saying:

"Thread, I pull thee;
Walpurga, I pray thee,
That thou show to me
What my husband's like to be."

They judge of his disposition by the thread's being strong or
easily broken, soft or tightly woven.

Dew on the morning of May first makes girls who wash in it
beautiful.

"The fair maid who on the first of May
Goes to the fields at break of day
And washes in dew from the hawthorn tree
Will ever after handsome be."

_Encyclopedia of Superstitions._

A heavy dew on this morning presages a good "butter-year." You will
find fateful initials printed in dew on a handkerchief that has
been left out all the night of April thirtieth. On May Day girls
invoke the cuckoo:

"Cuckoo! cuckoo! on the bough,
Tell me truly, tell me how
Many years there will be
Till a husband comes to me."

Then they count the calls of the cuckoo until he pauses again.

If a man wears clothes made of yarn spun on Walpurgis Night to the
May-shooting, he will always hit the bull's-eye, for the Devil
gives away to those he favors, "freikugeln," bullets which always
hit the mark.

On Walpurgis Night as on Hallowe'en strange things may happen to
one. Zschokke tells a story of a Walpurgis Night dream that is more
a vision than a dream. Led to be unfaithful to his wife, a man
murders the husband of a former sweetheart; to escape capture he
fires a haystack, from which a whole village is kindled. In his
flight he enters an empty carriage, and drives away madly, crushing
the owner under the wheels. He finds that the dead man is his own
brother. Faced by the person whom he believes to be the Devil,
responsible for his misfortunes, the wretched man is ready to
worship him if he will protect him. He finds that the seeming Devil
is in reality his guardian-angel who sent him this dream that he
might learn the depths of wickedness lying unfathomed in his
heart, waiting an opportunity to burst out.

Both May Eve and St. John's Eve are times of freedom and
unrestraint. People are filled with a sort of madness w