They then feasted him richly, and, lastly, with pine-knot torches lighted him to his finely decorated apartments.

For though it was moonlight, the Duke Casimir loved to come home amid the red flame of torches, the trail of bituminous reek, and with a dashing train of riders clattering up to the Wolfsberg behind him, through the streets of Thorn, lying black and cowed under the shadows of its thousand gables.

After him another squadron of riders in ghastly armor of black-and-white, with torches in their hand and grinning skulls upon their shields, closed in the array.

The torches were planted in the iron hold-fasts round about.

The light flickered and filtered in from the torches in the streets, and the reflected glow of the bonfire on the roof made the stair-head clear as a lucid twilight.

Cool and collected, the Judge and his party, with lanterns and torches, accompanied by Coe, proceeded to the point where he parted with Julia, when it was discovered that what she had mistaken for her father's fields, was a new opening in the woods, a considerable distance back from them.

She went, and clambered, and looked, and called, and when she could look and go no further, as woman may, she waited, and watched, and prayed, and the night grew cold, and the wind and snow came, and as trumpets were blown and guns discharged, and fires lighted in the woods, and torches flashed and lanterns gleamed through the trees, she still watched, and hoped, and prayed.

The boys light torches at the new fire and run to fumigate the pastures.

Finally the torches are thrown in a heap on the meadow and allowed to burn out.

In Servia on Midsummer Eve herdsmen light torches of birch bark and march round the sheepfolds and cattle-stalls; then they climb the hills and there allow the torches to burn out.

They were lit on the most conspicuous points of the landscape.[470] Near St. Jean, in the Jura, it appears that at this season young people still repair to the cross-roads and heights, and there wave burning torches so as to present the appearance of fiery wheels in the darkness.

St. Peter's Eve (the twenty-eighth of June) is distinguished by a similar display of bonfires and torches, although the 'quay-fair' on St. Peter's-day (the twenty-ninth of June), has been discontinued upwards of forty years.

On either side of this line young men and women pass up and down, swinging round their heads heavy torches made of large pieces of folded canvas steeped in tar, and nailed to the ends of sticks between three and four feet long; the flames of some of these almost equal those of the tar-barrels.

In the northeast of Scotland, down to the latter half of the eighteenth century, farmers used to go round their lands with burning torches about the middle of June.

In a circle round the great fire lesser fires were kindled; and last of all the lads ran about swinging their lighted torches, till these twinkling points of fire, moving down the mountain-side, went out one by one in the darkness.

[The custom of carrying lighted torches about the country at the festival may be explained as an attempt to diffuse the Sun's heat.]

At the festivals which we are considering the custom of kindling bonfires is commonly associated with a custom of carrying lighted torches about the fields, the orchards, the pastures, the flocks and the herds; and we can hardly doubt that the two customs are only two different ways of attaining the same object, namely, the benefits which are believed to flow from the fire, whether it be stationary or portable.

Accordingly if we accept the solar theory of the bonfires, we seem bound to apply it also to the torches; we must suppose that the practice of marching or running with blazing torches about the country is simply a means of diffusing far and wide the genial influence of the sunshine, of which these flickering flames are a feeble imitation.

In favour of this view it may be said that sometimes the torches are carried about the fields for the express purpose of fertilizing them,[850] and for the same purpose live coals from the bonfires are sometimes placed in the fields "to prevent blight."

Once more, the custom of carrying lighted brands round cattle is plainly equivalent to driving the animals through the bonfire; and if the bonfire is a sun-charm, the torches must be so also.

This suspicion is confirmed when we examine the evils for which the bonfires and torches were supposed to provide a remedy.

At some of their ceremonies the Indians of North-West America imitate lightning by means of pitch-wood torches which are flashed through the roof of the house.

Some bore lighted torches, others copper buckets.

She suddenly sprang to the window, and, pressing her eyes to the pane, saw through the misty turmoil of tossing boughs and swaying branches the scintillating intermittent flames of torches moving on the trail above, and knew it was there!

"Dad," she said, in her ordinary indifferent tone, "there's torches movin; up toward the diamond pit.