r by pique or humour, to scatter certain fires, and the
attack and defence were often conducted with art and with fury."[596]
Down to about the middle of the nineteenth century "the Braemar
Highlanders made the circuit of their fields with lighted torches at
Hallowe'en to ensure their fertility in the coming year. At that date
the custom was as follows: Every member of the family (in those days
households were larger than they are now) was provided with a bundle of
fir 'can'les' with which to go the round. The father and mother stood at
the hearth and lit the splints in the peat fire, which they passed to
the children and servants, who trooped out one after the other, and
proceeded to tread the bounds of their little property, going slowly
round at equal distances apart, and invariably with the sun. To go
'withershins' seems to have been reserved for cursing and
excommunication. When the fields had thus been circumambulated the
remaining spills were thrown together in a heap and allowed to burn
out."[597]

[Divination at Hallow-e'en in the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland;
the stolen kail; sowing hemp seed; the winnowing basket; the wet shirt;
the thrown shoe.]

In the Highlands of Scotland, as the evening of Hallowe'en wore on,
young people gathered in one of the houses and resorted to an almost
endless variety of games, or rather forms of divination, for the purpose
of ascertaining the future fate of each member of the company. Were they
to marry or remain single, was the marriage to take place that year or
never, who was to be married first, what sort of husband or wife she or
he was to get, the name, the trade, the colour of the hair, the amount
of property of the future spouse--these were questions that were eagerly
canvassed and the answers to them furnished never-failing
entertainment.[598] Nor were these modes of divination at Hallowe'en
confined to the Highlands, where the bonfires were kindled; they were
practised with equal faith and in practically the same forms in the
Lowlands, as we learn, for example, from Burns's poem _Hallowe'en_,
which describes the auguries drawn from a variety of omens by the
Ayrshire peasantry. These Lowlanders of Saxon descent may well have
inherited the rites from the Celts who preceded them in the possession
of the south country. A common practice at Hallowe'en was to go out
stealthily to a neighbour's kailyard and there, with shut eyes, to pull
up the first kail stock that c