between eleven and twelve on St. John’s Night and wash yourself in three wells, you will see all who are to die in the following year.[424] At Gratz on St. John’s Eve (the twenty-third of June) the common people used to make a puppet called the Tatermann, which they dragged to the bleaching ground, and pelted with burning besoms till it took fire.[425] At Reutte, in the Tyrol, people believed that the flax would grow as high as they leaped over the midsummer bonfire, and they took pieces of charred wood from the fire and stuck them in their flax-fields the same night, leaving them there till the flax harvest had been got in.[426] In Lower Austria fires are lit in the fields, commonly in front of a cross, and the people dance and sing round them and throw flowers into the flames.  Before each handful of flowers is tossed into the fire, a set speech is made; then the dance is resumed and the dancers sing in chorus the last words of the speech.  At evening bonfires are kindled on the heights, and the boys caper round them, brandishing lighted torches drenched in pitch.  Whoever jumps thrice across the fire will not suffer from fever within the year.  Cart-wheels are often smeared with pitch, ignited, and sent rolling and blazing down the hillsides.[427]

[Midsummer fires in Bohemia; wreaths thrown across the fire; uses made of the singed wreaths; burning wheels rolled down hill; embers of the fire stuck in fields, gardens, and houses as a talisman against lightning and conflagration; use of mugwort; cattle protected against witchcraft.]

All over Bohemia bonfires still burn on Midsummer Eve.  In the afternoon boys go about with handcarts from house to house collecting fuel, such as sticks, brushwood, old besoms, and so forth.  They make their request at each house in rhyming verses, threatening with evil consequences the curmudgeons who refuse them a dole.  Sometimes the young men fell a tall straight fir in the woods and set it up on a height, where the girls deck it with nosegays, wreaths of leaves, and red ribbons.  Then brushwood is piled about it, and at nightfall the whole is set on fire.  While the flames break out, the young men climb the tree and fetch down the wreaths which the girls had placed on it.  After that, lads and lasses stand on opposite sides of the fire and look at one another through the wreaths to see whether they will be true to each other and marry within the year.  Also the girls throw the wreaths across the flames to the men, and woe to the awkward swain who fails to catch the wreath thrown him by his sweetheart.  When the blaze has died down, each couple takes hands, and leaps thrice across the fire.  He or she who does so will be free from ague throughout the year, and the flax will grow as high as the young folks leap.  A girl who sees nine bonfires on Midsummer Eve will marry before the year is out.  The singed wreaths are carried home and carefully preserved throughout the year.  During thunderstorms a bit of the wreath