Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 2, 1891.djvu/362

 306 with only one fixed holiday, namely, Sunday. The same shifting has partly happened in Wales, where Lammas is Gwyl Awst, or the festival of Augustus, since the birthday of Augustus, auspiciously for him and the celebrity of his day, fell in with the great day of the god Lug in the Celtic world. Now the day for going up the Van Vach mountain in Brecknock was Lammas, but under a Protestant church it became the first Sunday in August, and even modified in that way it could not long survive under a vigorous Protestant régime either in Wales or Man. As to the latter in particular, I have heard it related by persons who were present, how the crowds on the top of South Barrule on the first Sunday in Harvest were denounced as pagans, by a preacher called William Gick, some seventy years ago; and how another man called Paric Beg, or Little Patrick, preaching to the crowds on Snæfell, in milder terms, used to wind up the service with a collection, which appears to have proved a speedier method of reducing the dimensions of these meetings on the mountain-tops. Be that as it may, they seem to have dwindled since then to comparative insignificance.

If you ask the reason for this custom now, for it is not yet quite extinct, you are told, first, that it is merely to gather ling berries; but now and then a quasi-religious reason is given, namely, that it is the day on which Jephthah's Daughter and her companions went forth on the mountains to bewail her virginity: somehow, some Manx people make believe that they are doing likewise. That is not all, for people who have never themselves thought of going up the mountains on the first Sunday of Harvest or any other, will be found devoutly reading at home about Jephthah's Daughter on that day. I was told this first in the South by a clergyman's wife, who, finding a woman in the parish reading the chapter in question on that day, asked the reason for her fixing on that particular portion of the Bible. She then had the Manx view of the matter fully explained to her, and she has since found