over the fires;
burning discs thrown into the air; Midsummer fires in Alsace, Lorraine,
the Eifel, the Harz districts and Thuringia; burning barrel swung round
a pole.]

In Baden the children used to collect fuel from house to house for the
Midsummer bonfire on St. John's Day; and lads and lasses leaped over the
fire in couples. Here, as elsewhere, a close connexion was traced
between these bonfires and the harvest. In some places it was thought
that those who leaped over the fires would not suffer from backache at
reaping. Sometimes, as the young folk sprang over the flames, they
cried, "Grow, that the hemp may be three ells high!" This notion that
the hemp or the corn would grow as high as the flames blazed or as the
people jumped over them, seems to have been widespread in Baden. It was
held that the parents of the young people who bounded highest over the
fire would have the most abundant harvest; and on the other hand, if a
man contributed nothing to the bonfire, it was imagined that there would
be no blessing on his crops, and that his hemp in particular would never
grow.[409] In the neighbourhood of Buehl and Achern the St. John's fires
were kindled on the tops of hills; only the unmarried lads of the
village brought the fuel, and only the unmarried young men and women
sprang through the flames. But most of the villagers, old and young,
gathered round the bonfires, leaving a clear space for the leapers to
take their run. One of the bystanders would call out the names of a pair
of sweethearts; on which the two would step out from the throng, take
each other by the hand, and leap high and lightly through the swirling
smoke and flames, while the spectators watched them critically and drew
omens of their married life from the height to which each of them
bounded. Such an invitation to jump together over the bonfire was
regarded as tantamount to a public betrothal.[410] Near Offenburg, in
the Black Forest, on Midsummer Day the village boys used to collect
faggots and straw on some steep and conspicuous height, and they spent
some time in making circular wooden discs by slicing the trunk of a
pine-tree across. When darkness had fallen, they kindled the bonfire,
and then, as it blazed up, they lighted the discs at it, and, after
swinging them to and fro at the end of a stout and supple hazel-wand,
they hurled them one after the other, whizzing and flaming, into the
air, where they described great arcs of fire, to fall a