many others, have no doubt been handed down to us from the early ages of Christianity.  The same may be said of a vast number of customs of a more or less local character, which have been observed in various countries for centuries.  In former times, at Ochsenbach, in Wurtemberg, during the carnival, women held a feast at which they were waited upon by men, and, after it was over, they formed themselves into a sort of court of plenary indulgence, from which the men were uniformly excluded, and sat in judgment on one another.  At Ramerupt, a small town in Champagne, every year, on the 1st of May, twenty of the citizens repaired to the adjoining hamlet of St. Remy, hunting as they went along.  They were called the fools of Rameru, and it was said that the greatest fool led the band.  The inhabitants of St. Remy were bound to receive them gratuitously, and to supply them, as well as their horses and dogs, with what they required, to have a mass said for them, to put up with all the absurd vagaries of the captain and his troop, and to supply them with a fine and handsome horned ram, which was led back in triumph.  On their return into Ramerupt they set up shouts at the door of the cure, the procurator fiscal, and the collector of taxes, and, after the invention of gunpowder, fireworks were let off.  They then went to the market-place, where they danced round the ram, which was decorated with ribbons.  No doubt this was a relic of the feasts of ancient heathenism.

A more curious ceremony still, whose origin, we think, may be traced to the Dionysian feasts of heathenism, has continued to be observed to this day at Beziers.  It bears the names of the Feast of Pepezuch, the Triumph of Beziers, or the Feast of Caritats or Charites.  At the bottom of the Rue Francaise at Beziers, a statue is to be seen which, notwithstanding the mutilations to which it has been subjected, still distinctly bears traces of being an ancient work of the most refined period of art.  This statue represents Pepezuch, a citizen of Beziers, who, according to somewhat questionable tradition, valiantly defended the town against the Goths, or, as some say, against the English; its origin, therefore, cannot be later than the thirteenth century.  On Ascension Day, the day of the Feast of Pepezuch, an immense procession went about the town.  Three remarkable machines were particularly noticeable; the first was an enormous wooden camel made to walk by mechanism, and to move its limbs and jaws; the second was a galley on wheels fully manned; the third consisted of a cart on which a travelling theatre was erected.  The consuls and other civic authorities, the corporations of trades having the pastors walking in front of them, the farriers on horseback, all bearing their respective insignia and banners, formed the procession.  A double column, composed of a division of young men and young women holding white hoops decorated with ribbons and many-coloured streamers, was preceded by