On the first of the month bonfires were lighted, as they have been by the Welsh in quite recent times, and, along with the fire, the emblem of purity, offerings were made on behalf of the dead, the sacrifices of animals being so numerous on this and other days, that the month acquired the name of Blot-monath, _i.e._, Blood-month. The Venerable Bede, {156} tells us that, at the request of Pope Boniface, A.D. 611, the Emperor Phocas ordered, according to a general practice, that, on the site, in Rome, where “all the gods” had been worshipped, which was called the Pantheon, the filth of idolatry being abolished, a church should be erected in memory of the Blessed Virgin and all Martyrs; and on this principle, in other places also, the site of the heathen worship, and the day of its special observance, were transformed into the occasion and place of observance of the Christian festival of “All Hallows,” or “All Saints” day; and in the course of re-corrupting time the offering on behalf of the dead by the heathen, and the commemorative ceremony of the early Christian, passed into “prayers for the dead,” which became general in a later age. Further, to give their sympathies a wider compass, the old “Golden Legend” tells us that “Saynt Odylle ordeyned that the feast and remembraunce of all them that ben departed (generally) out of this worlde sholde be holden in al monasteryes, the daye after the fest Halowen (All Hallows even); the wyche thynge was approved after all holye Chyrche.” {157} This is the old Christian black-letter festival of “All Souls,” generally, as distinguished from the red-letter, “All Saints day.” Such are some of the old traditions which hang, like evergreen garlands, round our sacred places. Children may once have “passed through fire to Molech” where now the heaving turf shrouds the skeleton of a decayed church. On the walls of the church are tablets with the following inscriptions:—“To the beloved memory of Frederick Evan Cowper Smith, Lieutenant, Royal Artillery, eldest son of the late T. F. Smith formerly Rector of this Parish. He died of Fever, brought on by over-exertion in the discharge of his duty, while on active service in Afghanistan, with the Kyber Line Field Force, on July 26th, 1880, when he had just completed 19 years of earthly life. Jesu Mercy.” A second is as follows:—“Sacred to the memory of Arthur Monro Cowper Smith, Captain in the Royal Field Artillery, and graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge; he died at Beira, East Africa, on Sept. 28, 1898, in the 36th year of his age, of injuries received in a grass fire while shooting big game on the Pungwe River. He was the second son of the Rev. T. F. Smith, B.D., late Rector of this Parish.” Another tablet is in memory of the Rev. T. F. Smith, B.C., “formerly Fellow of St. Mary Magdalen College, Oxford, and Rector of this parish, who died May 21, 1871, aged 50.”