of the need-fire used to present some interesting features, which are best described in the words of an eyewitness:—­“In the year 1833 I came for the first time as a young merchant to Slavonia; it was to Gaj that I went, in the Pozega district.  The time was autumn, and it chanced that a cattle-plague was raging in the neighbourhood, which inflicted much loss on the people.  The peasants believed that the plague was a woman, an evil spirit (Kutga), who was destroying the cattle; so they sought to banish her.  I had then occasion to observe the proceedings in the villages of Gaj, Kukunjevac, Brezina, and Brekinjska.  Towards evening the whole population of the village was busy laying a ring of brushwood round the boundaries of the village.  All fires were extinguished throughout the village.  Then pairs of men in several places took pieces of wood, which had been specially prepared for the purpose, and rubbed them together till they emitted sparks.  The sparks were allowed to fall on tinder and fanned into a flame, with which the dry brushwood was kindled.  Thus the fire burned all round the village.  The peasants persuaded themselves that thereupon Kuga must take her departure."[715]

[The need-fire in Servia.]

This last account leaves no doubt as to the significance of the need-fire in the minds of Slavonian peasantry.  They regard it simply as a barrier interposed between their cattle and the evil spirit, which prowls, like a hungry wolf, round the fold and can, like a wolf, be kept at bay by fire.  The same interpretation of the need-fire comes out, hardly less clearly, in the account which another writer gives of a ceremony witnessed by him at the village of Setonje, at the foot of the Homolje mountains in the great forest of Servia.  An epidemic was raging among the children, and the need-fire was resorted to as a means of staying the plague.  It was produced by an old man and an old woman in the first of the ways described above; that is, they made it in the dark by rubbing two sticks of lime wood against each other.  Before the healing virtue of the fire was applied to the inhabitants of the village, two old women performed the following ceremony.  Both bore the name of Stana, from the verb stati, “to remain standing”; for the ceremony could not be successfully performed by persons of any other name.  One of them carried a copper kettle full of water, the other an old house-lock with the key.  Thus equipped they repaired to a spot outside of the village, and there the old dame with the kettle asked the old dame with the lock, “Whither away?” and the other answered her, “I came to shut the village against ill-luck.”  With that she locked the lock and threw it with the key into the kettle of water.  Then they marched thrice round the village, repeating the ceremony of the lock and key at each round.  Meantime all the villagers, arrayed in their best clothes, were assembled in an open place.  All the fires in the