to a cross-road and listened to the wind, they would learn all the most important things that would befall them during the next twelve months.[584] In Wales, too, not so long ago women used to congregate in the parish churches on the night of Hallowe’en and read their fate from the flame of the candle which each of them held in her hand; also they heard the names or saw the coffins of the parishioners who would die within the year, and many were the sad scenes to which these gloomy visions gave rise.[585] And in the Highlands of Scotland anybody who pleased could hear proclaimed aloud the names of parishioners doomed to perish within the next twelve months, if he would only take a three-legged stool and go and sit on it at three cross-roads, while the church clock was striking twelve at midnight on Hallowe’en.  It was even in his power to save the destined victims from their doom by taking with him articles of wearing apparel and throwing them away, one by one, as each name was called out by the mysterious voice.[586]

[Hallowe’en bonfires in the Highlands of Scotland; John Ramsay’s account of the Hallowe’en bonfires; divination from stones at the fire; Hallowe’en fires in the parishes of Callander and Logierait.]

But while a glamour of mystery and awe has always clung to Hallowe’en in the minds of the Celtic peasantry, the popular celebration of the festival has been, at least in modern times, by no means of a prevailingly gloomy cast; on the contrary it has been attended by picturesque features and merry pastimes, which rendered it the gayest night of all the year.  Amongst the things which in the Highlands of Scotland contributed to invest the festival with a romantic beauty were the bonfires which used to blaze at frequent intervals on the heights.  “On the last day of autumn children gathered ferns, tar-barrels, the long thin stalks called gainisg, and everything suitable for a bonfire.  These were placed in a heap on some eminence near the house, and in the evening set fire to.  The fires were called Samhnagan.  There was one for each house, and it was an object of ambition who should have the biggest.  Whole districts were brilliant with bonfires, and their glare across a Highland loch, and from many eminences, formed an exceedingly picturesque scene."[587] Like the Beltane fires on the first of May, the Hallowe’en bonfires seem to have been kindled most commonly in the Perthshire Highlands.  Travelling in the parish of Moulin, near Pitlochrie, in the year 1772, the Englishman Thomas Pennant writes that “Hallow Eve is also kept sacred:  as soon as it is dark, a person sets fire to a bush of broom fastened round a pole, and, attended with a crowd, runs about the village.  He then flings it down, heaps great quantity of combustible matters on it, and makes a great bonfire.  A whole tract is thus illuminated at the same time, and makes a fine appearance."[588] The custom has been described more fully by a Scotchman