assisted as spectators at the burning, and, while they shook their heads, agreed among themselves that it served Joh.  Koehler perfectly right.[691] According to a writer who published his book about nine years afterwards, some of the Germans, especially in the Wassgaw mountains, confidently believed that a cattle-plague could be stayed by driving the animals through a need-fire which had been kindled by the violent friction of a pole on a quantity of dry oak wood; but it was a necessary condition of success that all fires in the village should previously be extinguished with water, and any householder who failed to put out his fire was heavily fined.[692]

[Method kindling the need fire.]

The method of kindling the need-fire is described as follows by a writer towards the end of the seventeenth century:  “When an evil plague has broken out among the cattle, large and small, and the herds have thereby suffered great ravages, the peasants resolve to light a need-fire.  On a day appointed there must be no single flame in any house nor on any hearth.  From every house a quantity of straw and water and underwood must be brought forth; then a strong oaken pole is fixed firmly in the earth, a hole is bored in it, and a wooden winch, well smeared with pitch and tar, is inserted in the hole and turned round forcibly till great heat and then fire is generated.  The fire so produced is caught in fuel and fed with straw, heath, and underwood till it bursts out into a regular need-fire, which must then be somewhat spread out between walls or fences, and the cattle and horses driven through it twice or thrice with sticks and whips.  Others set up two posts, each with a hole in it, and insert a winch, along with old greasy rags, in the holes.  Others use a thick rope, collect nine kinds of wood, and keep them in violent motion till fire leaps forth.  Perhaps there may be other ways of generating or kindling this fire, but they are all directed simply at the cure of the cattle.  After passing twice or thrice through the fire the cattle are driven to their stalls or to pasture, and the heap of wood that had been collected is destroyed, but in some places every householder must take with him a brand, extinguish it in a washing-tub or trough, and put it in the manger where the cattle are fed, where it must lie for some time.  The poles that were used to make the need-fire, together with the wood that was employed as a winch, are sometimes burned with the rest of the fuel, sometimes carefully preserved after the cattle have been thrice driven through the flames."[693]

[The mode of kindling the need-fire about Hildesheim.]