witches tried to blow out the candle, and if they succeeded, so much
the worse for you; but if the flame burned steadily till the clocks had
struck midnight, you were safe. Some people performed the ceremony by
deputy; and parties went about from house to house in the evening
collecting candles, one for each inmate, and offering their services to
_late_ or _leet_ the witches, as the phrase ran. This custom was
practised at Longridge Fell in the early part of the nineteenth
century.[628] In Northumberland on Hallowe'en omens of marriage were
drawn from nuts thrown into the fire; and the sports of ducking for
apples and biting at a revolving apple and lighted candle were also
practised on that evening.[629] The equivalent of the Hallowe'en
bonfires is reported also from France. We are told that in the
department of Deux-Sevres, which forms part of the old province of
Poitou, young people used to assemble in the fields on All Saints' Day
(the first of November) and kindle great fires of ferns, thorns, leaves,
and stubble, at which they roasted chestnuts. They also danced round the
fires and indulged in noisy pastimes.[630]

Sec. 7. _The Midwinter Fires_

[A Midwinter festival of fire; Christmas the continuation of an old
heathen festival of the sun.]

If the heathen of ancient Europe celebrated, as we have good reason to
believe, the season of Midsummer with a great festival of fire, of which
the traces have survived in many places down to our own time, it is
natural to suppose that they should have observed with similar rites the
corresponding season of Midwinter; for Midsummer and Midwinter, or, in
more technical language, the summer solstice and the winter solstice,
are the two great turning-points in the sun's apparent course through
the sky, and from the standpoint of primitive man nothing might seem
more appropriate than to kindle fires on earth at the two moments when
the fire and heat of the great luminary in heaven begin to wane or to
wax. In this way the savage philosopher, to whose meditations on the
nature of things we owe many ancient customs and ceremonies, might
easily imagine that he helped the labouring sun to relight his dying
lamp, or at all events to blow up the flame into a brighter blaze.
Certain it is that the winter solstice, which the ancients erroneously
assigned to the twenty-fifth of December, was celebrated in antiquity as
the Birthday of the Sun, and that festal lights or fires were kin