as it blends with the liquid, the likeness of future bridegrooms, castles, coffins, and so forth.  But generally, as might perhaps have been anticipated, the obliging egg exhibits the features of a bridegroom.[533] In the Azores, also, bonfires are lit on Midsummer Eve (St. John’s Eve), and boys jump over them for luck.  On that night St. John himself is supposed to appear in person and bless all the seas and waters, driving out the devils and demons who had been disporting themselves in them ever since the second day of November; that is why in the interval between the second of November and the twenty-third of June nobody will bathe in the sea or in a hot spring.  On Midsummer Eve, too, you can always see the devil, if you will go into a garden at midnight.  He is invariably found standing near a mustard-plant.  His reason for adopting this posture has not been ascertained; perhaps in the chilly air of the upper world he is attracted by the genial warmth of the mustard.  Various forms of divination are practised by people in the Azores on Midsummer Eve.  Thus a new-laid egg is broken into a glass of water, and the shapes which it assumes foreshadow the fate of the person concerned.  Again, seven saucers are placed in a row, filled respectively with water, earth, ashes, keys, a thimble, money, and grass, which things signify travel, death, widowhood, housekeeping, spinsterhood, riches, and farming.  A blindfolded person touches one or other of the saucers with a wand and so discovers his or her fate.  Again, three broad beans are taken; one is left in its skin, one is half peeled, and the third is peeled outright.  The three denote respectively riches, competence, and poverty.  They are hidden and searched for; and he who finds one of them knows accordingly whether he will be rich, moderately well-off, or poor.  Again, girls take slips of paper and write the names of young men twice over on them.  These they fold up and crumple and place one set under their pillows and the other set in a saucer full of water.  In the morning they draw one slip of paper from under their pillow, and see whether one in the water has opened out.  If the names on the two slips are the same, it is the name of her future husband.  Young men do the same with girls’ names.  Once more, if a girl rises at sunrise, goes out into the street, and asks the first passer-by his Christian name, that will be her husband’s name.[534] Some of these modes of divination resemble those which are or used to be practised in Scotland at Hallowe’en.[535] In Corsica on the Eve of St. John the people set fire to the trunk of a tree or to a whole tree, and the young men and maidens dance round the blaze, which is called fucaraia.[536] We have seen that at Ozieri, in Sardinia, a great bonfire is kindled on St. John’s Eve, and that the young people dance round it.[537]

[The Midsummer fires in the Abruzzi; bathing on Midsummer Eve in the Abruzzi; the Midsummer fires in Sicily; the witches at Midsummer.]