tive
tribal rites; it is a summer festival, falling usually at
Ascensiontide, and is held with greater or less ceremony. Now, indeed,
it has become just a holiday affair for children, who dress up and
parade the town or village with a hobby-horse and a few vague
ceremonies, now become shadowy and meaningless, as in the beating of
the bounds which takes place in the older part of the town of Minehead.

There are many scores of superstitious practices, as distinguished from
these remains of actual ritual of which I have spoken, still in use
among country-folk. In Devonshire they still take a sick child, very
early in the morning, and hold it over a stream which is running east,
with a long thread tied to its finger, so that as the water carries the
thread eastwards away from the child the sickness will also be carried
away. This, which seems to us so incomprehensible a belief, is one of
that very large class of primitive practices which imitate a certain
desired condition, as in the rain-making of certain tribes of red
Indians, when, having danced ceremonially round a large tub of water,
one of the number takes a mouthful and spirts it into the air in
imitation of rain. This is what they call a "charm"; there are charms
for the stanching of blood, for making the cows yield well, for the
cure of toothache, for averting evil from a young child; when a
Devonshire woman is asked to a christening, she still takes with her a
saffron cake, and gives it to the first stranger that she meets on her
way to church. But when the cattle are diseased, they have, or had as
late as 1883, when the ceremony was witnessed and recorded, a rite
which is more than a charm; for a sheep or calf is taken from the herd
and sacrificed, and either burned, or buried in a corner of the field
belonging to the farmer whose cattle are diseased.

But there is another practice in Devon and Cornwall which we may
proclaim a superstition, but to which the tragedies of these wild
coasts give but too grim an earnestness to those who practise it. When
a ship is long overdue, and a woman can bear the suspense no longer,
she goes down to the seashore and calls her husband by name. Over and
over again she calls him, her neighbours standing by, until over the
waters the voice of her drowned husband comes in answer. Then she
turns and goes to her desolate cottage, with hope put out of her heart.
How often these cries of sorrow and bereavement have gone out fr