rtha's Hill, and poor widows pick
up six-pences from a tomb in the churchyard of St. Bartholomew the
Great, London, on the same Holy Day.

Easter brings its Pace eggs, symbols of the Resurrection, and
Yorkshire children roll them against one another in fields and
gardens. The Biddenham cakes are distributed, and the Hallaton
hare-scramble and bottle-kicking provide a rough scramble and a
curious festival for Easter Monday. On St. Mark's Day the ghosts of
all who will die during the year in the villages of Yorkshire pass at
midnight before the waiting people, and Hock-tide brings its quaint
diversions to the little Berkshire town of Hungerford.

The diversions of May Day are too numerous to be chronicled here, and
I must refer the reader to my book for a full description of the
sports that usher in the spring; but we must not forget the remarkable
Furry Dance at Helston on May 8th, and the beating of the bounds of
many a township during Rogation Week. Our boys still wear oak-leaves
on Royal Oak Day, and the Durham Cathedral choir sing anthems on the
top of the tower in memory of the battle of Neville's Cross, fought so
long ago as the year 1346.

Club-feasts and morris-dancers delight the rustics at Whitsuntide, and
the wakes are well kept up in the north of England, and rush-beating
at Ambleside, and hay-strewing customs in Leicestershire. The horn
dance at Abbot Bromley is a remarkable survival. The fires on
Midsummer Eve are still lighted in a few places in Wales, but are fast
dying out. Ratby, in Leicestershire, is a home of old customs, and has
an annual feast, when the toast of the immortal memory of John of
Gaunt is drunk with due solemnity. Harvest customs were formerly very
numerous, but are fast dying out before the reaping-machines and
agricultural depression. The "kern-baby" has been dead some years.

Bonfire night and the commemoration of the discovery of Gunpowder Plot
and the burning of "guys" are still kept up merrily, but few know the
origin of the festivities or concern themselves about it. Soul cakes
and souling still linger on in Cheshire, and cattering and clemmening
on the feasts of St. Catherine and St. Clement are still observed in
East Sussex.

Very remarkable are the local customs which linger on in some of our
towns and villages and are not confined to any special day in the
year. Thus, at Abbots Ann, near Andover, the good people hang up
effigies of arms and hands in memory of girls who