the hill of Cairnshee, in the parish of Durris, Kincardineshire, the herdsmen of the country round about annually kindle a bonfire at sunset on Midsummer Day (the twenty-fourth of June); the men or lads collect the fuel and push each other through the smoke and flames.  The custom is kept up through the benefaction of a certain Alexander Hogg, a native of the parish, who died about 1790 and left a small sum for the maintenance of a midsummer bonfire on the spot, because as a boy he had herded cattle on the hill.  We may conjecture that in doing so he merely provided for the continuance of an old custom which he himself had observed in the same place in his youth.[529] At the village of Tarbolton in Ayrshire a bonfire has been annually kindled from time immemorial on the evening of the first Monday after the eleventh of June.  A noted cattle-market was formerly held at the fair on the following day.  The bonfire is still lit at the gloaming by the lads and lasses of the village on a high mound or hillock just outside of the village.  Fuel for it is collected by the lads from door to door.  The youth dance round the fire and leap over the fringes of it.  The many cattle-drovers who used to assemble for the fair were wont to gather round the blazing pile, smoke their pipes, and listen to the young folk singing in chorus on the hillock.  Afterwards they wrapped themselves in their plaids and slept round the bonfire, which was intended to last all night.[530] Thomas Moresin of Aberdeen, a writer of the sixteenth century, says that on St. Peter’s Day, which is the twenty-ninth of June, the Scotch ran about at night with lighted torches on mountains and high grounds, “as Ceres did when she roamed the whole earth in search of Proserpine";[531] and towards the end of the eighteenth century the parish minister of Loudoun, a district of Ayrshire whose “bonny woods and braes” have been sung by Burns, wrote that “the custom still remains amongst the herds and young people to kindle fires in the high grounds in honour of Beltan. Beltan, which in Gaelic signifies Baal, or Bel’s-fire, was antiently the time of this solemnity.  It is now kept on St. Peter’s day."[532]

[The Midsummer fires in Spain and the Azores; divination on Midsummer Eve in the Azores; the Midsummer fires in Corsica and Sardinia.]

All over Spain great bonfires called lumes are still lit on Midsummer Eve.  They are kept up all night, and the children leap over them in a certain rhythmical way which is said to resemble the ancient dances.  On the coast, people at this season plunge into the sea; in the inland districts the villagers go and roll naked in the dew of the meadows, which is supposed to be a sovereign preservative against diseases of the skin.  On this evening, too, girls who would pry into the future put a vessel of water on the sill outside their window; and when the clocks strike twelve, they break an egg in the water and see, or fancy they see, in the shapes assumed by the pulp,