Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 20, 1909.djvu/346

300 logwood, are all prepared by the peasants themselves. In one recipe, for yellow dye, alum is added to an infusion of the bark or leaves of Pyrus sylvestris. Black dye is prepared from walnuts, and so on.

The Roumanians of Macedonia use only the white and red colours, like their kinsmen in the kingdom of Roumania, but usually both the colouring and the process are reversed, i.e. they produce a red design on a white ground instead of a white design on a red ground. To get this result the eggs are boiled in logwood, and then the lines of the design are put on in wax, not by means of an instrument, but by applying threads of wax prepared by hand, the designs and method reminding one of the well-known Macedonian filagree work. The eggs are then boiled in sour whey (the iaurt of the Balkan Peninsula), or in citric acid, which bleaches the red ground, leaving it white, and the design appearing in red when the wax is removed. A simpler process, which is now becoming more popular, is to draw the design on a red egg with a pen dipped in a moderately strong acid, thus getting white lines on a red ground.

The designs are of immense variety, but in Roumanian eggs differ in general character from those employed by neighbouring peoples. For example, Hungarian eggs have usually geometrical decorations, and less commonly patterns derived from the animal and vegetable worlds, although it may be remarked that the crocus is frequently to be seen on the eggs of the Szekler Hungarians. Ruthenian eggs are also in general geometrical in decoration, while Servian eggs are decorated in many colours, and have usually animal or vegetable subjects, which are, however, often so conventionalized that their origin is not easily recognizable. The same greater brilliance in colour, combined with less artistic value, distinguishes the Servian from the Roumanian national costume.

A selection of forty Roumanian designs, (a number which it would have been easy to multiply several times), is shown