down neatly on the open hearth.  If they find next morning a footprint turned towards the door, it signifies a death in the family within the year; but if the footprint is turned in the opposite direction, it bodes a marriage.  Again, divination by eavesdropping is practised in the Isle of Man in much the same way as in Scotland.  You go out with your mouth full of water and your hands full of salt and listen at a neighbour’s door, and the first name you hear will be the name of your husband.  Again, Manx maids bandage their eyes and grope about the room till they dip their hands in vessels full of clean or dirty water, and so on; and from the thing they touch they draw corresponding omens.  But some people in the Isle of Man observe these auguries, not on Hallowe’en or Hollantide Eve, as they call it, which was the old Manx New Year’s Eve, but on the modern New Year’s Eve, that is, on the thirty-first of December.  The change no doubt marks a transition from the ancient to the modern mode of dating the beginning of the year.[625]

[Hallowe’en fires and divination in Lancashire; candles lighted to keep off the witches; divination at Hallowe’en in Northumberland; Hallowe’en fires in France.]

In Lancashire, also, some traces of the old Celtic celebration of Hallowe’en have been reported in modern times.  It is said that “fires are still lighted in Lancashire, on Hallowe’en, under the name of Beltains or Teanlas; and even such cakes as the Jews are said to have made in honour of the Queen of Heaven, are yet to be found at this season amongst the inhabitants of the banks of the Ribble....  Both the fires and the cakes, however, are now connected with superstitious notions respecting Purgatory, etc."[626] On Hallowe’en, too, the Lancashire maiden “strews the ashes which are to take the form of one or more letters of her lover’s name; she throws hemp-seed over her shoulder and timidly glances to see who follows her."[627] Again, witches in Lancashire used to gather on Hallowe’en at the Malkin Tower, a ruined and desolate farm-house in the forest of Pendle.  They assembled for no good purpose; but you could keep the infernal rout at bay by carrying a lighted candle about the fells from eleven to twelve o’clock at night.  The witches tried to blow out the candle, and if they succeeded, so much the worse for you; but if the flame burned steadily till the clocks had struck midnight, you were safe.  Some people performed the ceremony by deputy; and parties went about from house to house in the evening collecting candles, one for each inmate, and offering their services to late or leet the witches, as the phrase ran.  This custom was practised at Longridge Fell in the early part of the nineteenth century.[628] In Northumberland on Hallowe’en omens of marriage were drawn from nuts thrown into the fire; and the sports of ducking for apples and biting at a revolving apple and lighted candle were also practised on that evening.[629] The equivalent of the Hallowe’en bonfires is reported also from France.  We are told that in the department of Deux-Sevres, which forms part of the old province of Poitou, young people used to assemble in the fields on All Saints’ Day (the first of November) and kindle great fires of ferns, thorns, leaves, and stubble, at which they roasted chestnuts.  They also danced round the fires and indulged in noisy pastimes.[630]