houses had been previously extinguished.  Two sturdy yokels now dug a tunnel through a mound beside an oak tree; the tunnel was just high enough to let a man creep through it on all fours.  Two fires, lit by the need-fire, were now laid, one at each end of the tunnel; and the old woman with the kettle took her stand at the entrance of the tunnel, while the one with the lock posted herself at the exit.  Facing the latter stood another woman with a great pot of milk before her, and on the other side was set a pot full of melted swine’s fat.  All was now ready.  The villagers thereupon crawled through the tunnel on hands and knees, one behind the other.  Each, as he emerged from the tunnel, received a spoonful of milk from the woman and looked at his face reflected in the pot of melted swine’s fat.  Then another woman made a cross with a piece of charcoal on his back.  When all the inhabitants had thus crept through the tunnel and been doctored at the other end, each took some glowing embers home with him in a pot wherewith to rekindle the fire on the domestic hearth.  Lastly they put some of the charcoal in a vessel of water and drank the mixture in order to be thereby magically protected against the epidemic.[716]

It would be superfluous to point out in detail how admirably these measures are calculated to arrest the ravages of disease; but for the sake of those, if there are any, to whom the medicinal effect of crawling through a hole on hands and knees is not at once apparent, I shall merely say that the procedure in question is one of the most powerful specifics which the wit of man has devised for maladies of all sorts.  Ample evidence of its application will be adduced in a later part of this work.[717]

[The need-fire in Bulgaria.]

In Bulgaria the herds suffer much from the raids of certain blood-sucking vampyres called Ustrels.  An Ustrel is the spirit of a Christian child who was born on a Saturday and died unfortunately before he could be baptized.  On the ninth day after burial he grubs his way out of the grave and attacks the cattle at once, sucking their blood all night and returning at peep of dawn to the grave to rest from his labours.  In ten days or so the copious draughts of blood which he has swallowed have so fortified his constitution that he can undertake longer journeys; so when he falls in with great herds of cattle or flocks of sheep he returns no more to the grave for rest and refreshment at night, but takes up his quarters during the day either between the horns of a sturdy calf or ram or between the hind legs of a milch-cow.  Beasts whose blood he has sucked die the same night.  In any herd that he may fasten on he begins with the fattest animal and works his way down steadily through the leaner kine till not one single beast is left alive.  The carcases of the victims swell up, and when the hide is stripped off you can always perceive the livid patch of flesh where the monster sucked