cross-roads and heights, and there wave burning torches so as to present the appearance of fiery wheels in the darkness.[471] In Franche-Comte, the province of France which lies immediately to the west of the Jura mountains, the fires of St. John still shone on the saint’s day in several villages down to recent years.  They were generally lit on high ground and the young folks of both sexes sang and danced round them, and sprang over the dying flames.[472] In Bresse bonfires used to be kindled on Midsummer Eve (the twenty-third of June) and the people danced about them in a circle.  Devout persons, particularly old women, circumambulated the fires fourteen times, telling their beads and mumbling seven Paters and seven Aves in the hope that thereby they would feel no pains in their backs when they stooped over the sickle in the harvest field.[473] In Berry, a district of Central France, the midsummer fire was lit on the Eve of St. John and went by the name of the jonee, joannee, or jouannee.  Every family according to its means contributed faggots, which were piled round a pole on the highest ground in the neighbourhood.  In the hamlets the office of kindling the fire devolved on the oldest man, but in the towns it was the priest or the mayor who discharged the duty.  Here, as in Brittany, people supposed that a girl who had danced round nine of the midsummer bonfires would marry within the year.  To leap several times over the fire was regarded as a sort of purification which kept off sickness and brought good luck to the leaper.  Hence the nimble youth bounded through the smoke and flames, and when the fire had somewhat abated parents jumped across it with their children in their arms in order that the little ones might also partake of its beneficent influence.  Embers from the extinct bonfire were taken home, and after being dipped in holy water were kept as a talisman against all kinds of misfortune, but especially against lightning.[474] The same virtue was ascribed to the ashes and charred sticks of the midsummer bonfire in Perigord, where everybody contributed his share of fuel to the pile and the whole was crowned with flowers, especially with roses and lilies.[475] On the borders of the departments of Creuse and Correze, in Central France, the fires of St. John used to be lit on the Eve of the saint’s day (the twenty-third of June); the custom seems to have survived till towards the end of the nineteenth century.  Men, women, and children assembled round the fires, and the young people jumped over them.  Children were brought by their parents or elder brothers into contact with the flames in the belief that this would save them from fever.  Older people girded themselves with stalks of rye taken from a neighbouring field, because they fancied that by so doing they would not grow weary in reaping the corn at harvest.[476]

[The Midsummer fires in Poitou.]