resent some interesting features, which are best described in
the words of an eyewitness:--"In the year 1833 I came for the first time
as a young merchant to Slavonia; it was to Gaj that I went, in the
Pozega district. The time was autumn, and it chanced that a
cattle-plague was raging in the neighbourhood, which inflicted much loss
on the people. The peasants believed that the plague was a woman, an
evil spirit (_Kutga_), who was destroying the cattle; so they sought to
banish her. I had then occasion to observe the proceedings in the
villages of Gaj, Kukunjevac, Brezina, and Brekinjska. Towards evening
the whole population of the village was busy laying a ring of brushwood
round the boundaries of the village. All fires were extinguished
throughout the village. Then pairs of men in several places took pieces
of wood, which had been specially prepared for the purpose, and rubbed
them together till they emitted sparks. The sparks were allowed to fall
on tinder and fanned into a flame, with which the dry brushwood was
kindled. Thus the fire burned all round the village. The peasants
persuaded themselves that thereupon _Kuga_ must take her
departure."[715]

[The need-fire in Servia.]

This last account leaves no doubt as to the significance of the
need-fire in the minds of Slavonian peasantry. They regard it simply as
a barrier interposed between their cattle and the evil spirit, which
prowls, like a hungry wolf, round the fold and can, like a wolf, be kept
at bay by fire. The same interpretation of the need-fire comes out,
hardly less clearly, in the account which another writer gives of a
ceremony witnessed by him at the village of Setonje, at the foot of the
Homolje mountains in the great forest of Servia. An epidemic was raging
among the children, and the need-fire was resorted to as a means of
staying the plague. It was produced by an old man and an old woman in
the first of the ways described above; that is, they made it in the dark
by rubbing two sticks of lime wood against each other. Before the
healing virtue of the fire was applied to the inhabitants of the
village, two old women performed the following ceremony. Both bore the
name of Stana, from the verb _stati_, "to remain standing"; for the
ceremony could not be successfully performed by persons of any other
name. One of them carried a copper kettle full of water, the other an
old house-lock with the key. Thus equipped they repaired to a spot
outside of the