Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/359

 Rh the dew in order to secure luck, a good complexion, and immunity against witches. The break of this day is also the signal for firing the ling or the gorse, which used to be done in order to burn out the witches fond of taking the form of the hare; and even guns, I am told, were freely used to shoot any game met with on that morning. With the proper charge some of the witches were now and then hit and wounded, whereupon they resumed the human form and remained cripples for the rest of their lives. Fire, however, appears to have been the chief agency relied on to clear away the witches and other malignant beings; and I have heard of this use of fire having been carried so far that a practice was sometimes observed—as, for example in Lezayre—of burning gorse, however little, in the hedge of each field on a farm in order to drive away the witches and secure luck.

The man who told me this, on being asked whether he had ever heard of cattle being driven through fire or between two fires on May-day, replied that it was not known to him as a Manx custom, but that it was as an Irish one, A cattle-dealer whom he named used on Mayday to drive his cattle through fire so as to singe them a little, as he believed that would preserve them from harm. He was an Irishman, who came to the island for many years, and whose children are settled in the island now. On my asking him if he knew whence the dealer came, he answered, "From the mountains over there", pointing to the Mountains of Mourne looming indefinite in the mists on the western horizon. The Irish custom known to my Manx informant is interesting both as throwing light on the Manx custom, and as being the continuation of a very ancient rite mentioned by Cormac. That writer, or somebody in his name, says that Beltane, May-day, was so called from the "lucky fire", or the "two fires" which the druids of Erinn used to make on that day with great incantations; and cattle, he adds, used to be brought to those fires, or driven between them, as a safeguard against the diseases