nek," and set aside from the rest of the
field. At the end of the first day's reaping the oldest man present
takes the little sheaf and holds it aloft, crying, "We ha' un!" (We
have it!) The cry is repeated three times, and the rest of the
reapers, standing round the old man with their reaping-hooks in their
hands, bow down at each cry. The spokesman then cries out three times,
"Thee Nek!" or, as it is stated by some witnesses of the scene,
"Arnack, Arnack, Arnack!" and the little sheaf is carried off the field
and hung up in the church. I do not know the meaning of the cries, but
the whole ceremony is undoubtedly a dedication of the corn to the
Corn-Spirit, and the little sheaf which is carried home and hung up is
a rough image of the Corn-Maiden, like those plaited straw figures of
Demeter and Persephone the Greek husbandmen used to make, and which the
peasants of Sicily make still. Whether the observance of this rite in
Devonshire is of Roman date, or whether it goes farther back, to a
remoter tradition of preclassical times, it is difficult to say.

So it is, also, of the Devonshire custom of making an offering of wine
and honey to bees on the day of their owner's death, and of reversing
their hives until the corpse has been carried out of the house. The
Greeks poured honey, but not wine, in their rites for the dead, and in
all the ceremonies which had to do with the worship of the earth
deities--the ancient autochthonic gods, older than the Olympians. But
wine was strictly an offering to the gods of the heavens, not to the
gods of the underworld, or of death.

There is another custom, still very common in North Devon and Somerset,
for the young men of the countryside to climb the nearest hill-top to
see the sunrise over the ridge of the Quantocks or the distant Mendips
on Easter morning. They account for their action by saying it is "for
luck"; but this custom, if connected popularly with Christian worship,
has at its roots an older, sterner, and perhaps bloody origin. For,
searching back into the mists of antiquity, we find that those early
and mysterious peoples whose priests we call the "Druids," to whom the
mistletoe was sacred (and with which we decorate our houses at
Christmas, the festival of "peace and good-will"), offered human
sacrifices to their dark gods on high mountains and at the hour of
sunrise.

Whether the Britons whom Caesar describes as sacrificing human beings
in vast wicker cages