Here a stake was thrust into the ground and straw wrapt about it, so as to make a rude effigy of human form with arms, head, and face.  Every boy brought a handful of nosegays and fastened them to the straw-man, who was thus enveloped in flowers.  Fuel was heaped about the stake and set on fire.  When the Angel-man, as the straw-effigy was called, blazed up, all the boys of the neighbourhood, who had gathered expectantly around, fell upon him with their wooden swords and hewed him to pieces.  As soon as he had vanished in smoke and flame, the lads leaped backward and forward over the glowing embers, and later in the evening they feasted on the proceeds of their collection.[408] Here the Angel-man burnt in the fire appears to be identified with Martin Luther, to whom, as we have seen, allusion was made during the house-to-house visitation.  The identification was probably modern, for we may assume that the custom of burning an effigy in the Midsummer bonfire is far older than the time of Luther.

[The Midsummer fires in Baden; omens drawn from leaps over the fires; burning discs thrown into the air; Midsummer fires in Alsace, Lorraine, the Eifel, the Harz districts and Thuringia; burning barrel swung round a pole.]

In Baden the children used to collect fuel from house to house for the Midsummer bonfire on St. John’s Day; and lads and lasses leaped over the fire in couples.  Here, as elsewhere, a close connexion was traced between these bonfires and the harvest.  In some places it was thought that those who leaped over the fires would not suffer from backache at reaping.  Sometimes, as the young folk sprang over the flames, they cried, “Grow, that the hemp may be three ells high!” This notion that the hemp or the corn would grow as high as the flames blazed or as the people jumped over them, seems to have been widespread in Baden.  It was held that the parents of the young people who bounded highest over the fire would have the most abundant harvest; and on the other hand, if a man contributed nothing to the bonfire, it was imagined that there would be no blessing on his crops, and that his hemp in particular would never grow.[409] In the neighbourhood of Buehl and Achern the St. John’s fires were kindled on the tops of hills; only the unmarried lads of the village brought the fuel, and only the unmarried young men and women sprang through the flames.  But most of the villagers, old and young, gathered round the bonfires, leaving a clear space for the leapers to take their run.  One of the bystanders would call out the names of a pair of sweethearts; on which the two would step out from the throng, take each other by the hand, and leap high and lightly through the swirling smoke and flames, while the spectators watched them critically and drew omens of their married life from the height to which each of them bounded.  Such an invitation to jump together over the bonfire was regarded as tantamount to a public betrothal.[410] Near Offenburg, in the