Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 26, 1915.djvu/180

 1 70 Collectanea.

in surplice and stole, headed the procession, reading the opening sentences of the burial service. The body was then taken into the church, and the service proceeded with until the end of the verses from i Corinthians xv. Then the choristers sang some- thing to a very sad air. After this, very many of the congregation went up to a table which was in front of the altar-rails, and deposited thereon offerings of money (these, I was informed, were offerings for the clergyman). Then the corpse was taken out of the church, and the congregation followed without observing any order whatever. The body was lowered into the grave, and the remainder of the burial service (the whole of which was in the Welsh language) was read. Then the singers burst out with some beautiful singing, the air of which was very cheerful, and suggested to me that it expressed the hope of a joyful resurrection for the deceased. After this, the whole assembly broke up, and the people composing it went away in various directions.

A young peasant was looking at a drawing I was making of a view near Festiniog, and at last she remarked : " Well, you've made a drawing there that's worthy to have been done by King Arthur." (1891.)

Belgium. — In 1872 I was going with my father from Waulsort, near Dinant, to Falmignoul ; a peasant who accompanied us across the fields told us that it was said of a man who plucks a dandelion "qu'il est bien chique — c'est a dire, qu'il sait tout." He also showed us a flower something like the English sheep scabious, and said that it was called Fleur du diable.

In Brussels a narrow and very steep little street near the Rue Haute is called the Rue du Mont des Geants.

At Antwerp, on the evening of the second day (August iSth) of the Kermis, the children placed lighted candles in little hillocks of sand in the middle of the bye streets, -and danced around these lights. I could gain no further information regarding the custom than " ce n'est que le jeu des enfants."

In the rock on which the castle of Bouillon stands, and within the castle premises, is Godfrey de Bouillon's Seat and the seat of his lieutenant. They are two niches in the natural rock, and so shallow that it is difficult to sit in them, and so low that one's head, when one sits in them, touches their tops. (1872.)