There is a modern custom in places where fruit trees are grown for two men to go out into the orchard. One climbs up a tree while the other stands at the bottom with an axe. The latter asks whether it will have a good crop the next season, and threatens to cut it down if it fails to do so. Hereupon the man above answers for the tree, promising that it will bear plentifully. In Hitachi at the time of the Sai (or Sahe) no Kami feast (the first full moon of the year) a gruel is made of rice coloured red[137] with _adzuki_ beans. This is sprinkled on the fruit trees of the neighbourhood. The man who does so wears the straw covering of a rice-bag by way of hat, and takes with him an axe and the gruel vessel, saying to each tree, "Will you bear--will you bear, of bags 1,000 bags, of sacks 1,000 sacks? Say that you will bear." "I will bear, I will bear." Then he gives the tree three cuts with the axe, and pours the gruel on it. Similar customs are found all over the world. M. D'Alviella, in his Hibbert Lectures, quotes as follows: "Ibn al Awam's agricultural treatise recommends the intimidation of trees that refuse to produce fruit. 'You are to flog them mildly and threaten to cut them down if they go on bearing no fruit.'" The Bohemian Slavs used to say to the garden trees, "Bud! ye trees, bud! or I will strip you of your bark." Brand's 'Popular Antiquities of Britain' records several variants of this custom. "On Christmas Eve," he says, "the farmers and their men in Devonshire take a large bowl of cider, with a toast in it, and carrying it in state to the orchard, they salute the apple-trees with much ceremony, in order to make them bear well the next season." This salutation consists in throwing some of the cider about the roots of the tree, placing bits of the toast on the branches, and then, "encircling one of the best bearing trees in the orchard, they drink the following toast several times:-- 'Here's to thee, old apple-tree Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow, And whence thou mayst bear apples enow! Hats-full! caps-full! Bushel, bushel sacks-full! And my pockets full, too! Hurra!'" Mr. J. G. Frazer has treated this subject with his usual fulness in 'The Golden Bough.' I suspect that the pleasure we take in dramatic make-believe has more to do with such practices than any belief in their practical efficacy, and that they rather contain the germ of a religious cult of trees than are a survival of a primitive tree-worship. =Kukunochi=.--The older records mention a Kukunochi (trees-father), a Ki no mi-oya no Kami (tree-august-parent-deity). There is also a Ko-mata no Kami (tree-fork-deity) and a Ha-mori no Kami (leaf-guardian-deity). These are class-deities.