nd the stone altar or cairn on the
hill-top. Here stood an emblem of the sun, and on the cairn was a sacred
fire, which had been kept burning through the year. The Druids formed
about the fire, and, at a signal, quenched it, while deep silence rested
on the mountains and valleys. Then the new fire gleamed on the cairn,
the people in the valley raised a joyous shout, and from hill-top to
hill-top other fires answered the sacred flame. On this night, all
hearth-fires in the region had been put out, and they were kindled with
brands from the sacred fire, which was believed to guard the households
through the year.

But the Druids disappeared from their sacred places, the cairns on the
hill-tops became the monuments of a dead religion, and Christianity
spread to the barbarous inhabitants of France and the British Islands.
Yet the people still clung to their old customs, and felt much of the
old awe for them. Still they built their fires on the first of May,--at
the solstice in June,--and on the eve of November 1st. The church found
that it could not all at once separate the people from their old ways,
so it gradually turned these ways to its own use, and the harvest
festival of the Druids became in the Catholic Calendar the Eve of All
Saints, for that is the meaning of the name "All-hallow Eve." In the
seventh century, the Pantheon, the ancient Roman temple of all the gods,
was consecrated anew to the worship of the Virgin and of all holy
martyrs.

By its separation from the solemn character of the Druid festival,
All-hallow Eve lost much of its ancient dignity, and became the
carnival-night of the year for wild, grotesque rites. As century after
century passed by, it came to be spoken of as the time when the magic
powers, with which the peasantry, all the world over, filled the wastes
and ruins, were supposed to swarm abroad to help or injure men. It was
the time when those first dwellers in every land, the fairies, were said
to come out from their grots and lurking-places; and in the darkness of
the forests and the shadows of old ruins, witches and goblins gathered.
In course of time, the hallowing fire came to be considered a protection
against these malicious powers. It was a custom in the seventeenth
century for the master of a family to carry a lighted torch of straw
around his fields, to protect them from evil influence through the year,
and as he went he chanted an invocation to the fire. The chief thing
which we