el, a great wheel was made of
straw and dragged by three horses to the top of a hill. Thither the
village boys marched at nightfall, set fire to the wheel, and sent it
rolling down the slope. Two lads followed it with levers to set it in
motion again, in case it should anywhere meet with a check. At
Oberstattfeld the wheel had to be provided by the young man who was last
married.[289] About Echternach in Luxemburg the same ceremony is called
"burning the witch"; while it is going on, the older men ascend the
heights and observe what wind is blowing, for that is the wind which
will prevail the whole year.[290] At Voralberg in the Tyrol, on the
first Sunday in Lent, a slender young fir-tree is surrounded with a pile
of straw and firewood. To the top of the tree is fastened a human figure
called the "witch," made of old clothes and stuffed with gunpowder. At
night the whole is set on fire and boys and girls dance round it,
swinging torches and singing rhymes in which the words "corn in the
winnowing-basket, the plough in the earth" may be distinguished.[291] In
Swabia on the first Sunday in Lent a figure called the "witch" or the
"old wife" or "winter's grandmother" is made up of clothes and fastened
to a pole. This is stuck in the middle of a pile of wood, to which fire
is applied. While the "witch" is burning, the young people throw blazing
discs into the air. The discs are thin round pieces of wood, a few
inches in diameter, with notched edges to imitate the rays of the sun or
stars. They have a hole in the middle, by which they are attached to the
end of a wand. Before the disc is thrown it is set on fire, the wand is
swung to and fro, and the impetus thus communicated to the disc is
augmented by dashing the rod sharply against a sloping board. The
burning disc is thus thrown off, and mounting high into the air,
describes a long fiery curve before it reaches the ground. A single lad
may fling up forty or fifty of these discs, one after the other. The
object is to throw them as high as possible. The wand by which they are
hurled must, at least in some parts of Swabia, be of hazel. Sometimes
the lads also leap over the fire brandishing lighted torches of
pine-wood. The charred embers of the burned "witch" and discs are taken
home and planted in the flaxfields the same night, in the belief that
they will keep vermin from the fields.[292] At Wangen, near Molsheim in
Baden, a like custom is observed on the first Sunday in Len