The Twelfth Cake and the "King of the Bean"--French Twelfth Night Customs--St. Basil's Cake in Macedonia--Epiphany and the Expulsion of Evils--The Befana in Italy--The Magi as Present-bringers--Greek Epiphany Customs--Wassailing Fruit-trees--Herefordshire and Irish Twelfth Night Practices--The "Haxey Hood" and Christmas Football--St. Knut's Day in Sweden--Rock Day--Plough Monday--Candlemas, its Ecclesiastical and Folk Ceremonies--Farewells to Christmas. [Illustration: THE EPIPHANY IN FLORENCE.] THE EPIPHANY. Though the Epiphany has ceased to be a popular festival in England, it was once a very high day indeed, and in many parts of Europe it is still attended by folk-customs of great interest.[116] For the peasant of Tyrol, indeed, it is New Year's Day, the first of January being kept only by the townsfolk and modernized people.{1} To Englishmen perhaps the best known feature of the secular festival is the Twelfth Cake. Some words of Leigh Hunt's will show what an important place this held in the mid-nineteenth century:-- "Christmas goes out in fine style,--with Twelfth Night. It is a finish worthy of the time. Christmas Day was the morning of the season; New Year's Day the middle of it, or noon; Twelfth Night is the night, brilliant with innumerable planets of Twelfth-cakes. The whole island keeps court; nay, all Christendom. All the world are |338| kings and queens. Everybody is somebody else, and learns at once to laugh at, and to tolerate, characters different from his own, by enacting them. Cakes, characters, forfeits, lights, theatres, merry rooms, little holiday-faces, and, last not least, the painted sugar on the cakes, so bad to eat but so fine to look at, useful because it is perfectly useless except for a sight and a moral--all conspire to throw a giddy splendour over the last night of the season, and to send it to bed in pomp and colours, like a Prince."{2} * * * * * For seventeenth-century banqueting customs and the connection of the cake with the "King of the Bean" Herrick may be quoted:-- "Now, now the mirth comes With the cake full of plums, Where bean's the king of the sport here; Besides we must know, The pea also Must revel as queen in the court here. Begin then to choose This night as ye use, Who shall for the present delight here Be a king by the lot, And who shall not Be Twelfth-day queen for the night here Which known, let us make Joy-sops with the cake; And let not a man then be seen here, Who unurg'd will not drink, To the base from the brink, A health to the king and the queen here."{3}