One of the most picturesque survivals of this ancient custom takes place at Florence each year at Easter. This is fully described by Baring-Gould. The moment the sacred fire is produced at the high altar a dove (in plaster) carries it along a rope about 200 yards long to a car in the square outside the west door of the cathedral and sets fire to a fuse, thus causing the explosion of fireworks. The car with its explosives is the survival of the ancient bonfire. It would appear that the lighting of these fires on a large scale lingered longest in Ireland and Brittany. A correspondent of the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ (February, 1795) thus describes the Irish Beltane fires in 1782, “the most singular sight in Ireland”:-- “Exactly at midnight, the fires began to appear, and taking the advantage of going up to the leads of the house, which had a widely extended view, I saw on a radius of thirty miles, all around, the fires burning on every eminence which the country afforded. I had a farther satisfaction in learning, from undoubted authority, that the people danced round the fires, and at the close went through these fires, and made their sons and daughters, together with their cattle, pass through the fire; and the whole was conducted with religious solemnity.” It will have been observed with reference to these fire festivals that although there were undoubtedly four, in May, August, November and February, those in May and November were more important than the others. This no doubt arose from the fact that at different times the May and November celebrations were _New Year_ festivals. With regard to the New Year in November in Celtic and later times. Rhys writes as follows (_Hibbert Lectures_, p. 514):-- “The Celts were in the habit formerly of counting winters, and of giving precedence in their reckoning to night and winter over day and summer (p. 360); I should argue that the last day of the year in the Irish story of Diarmait’s death meant the eve of November or All-halloween, the night before the Irish _Samhain_, and known in Welsh as _Nos Galan-gaeaf_, or the Night of the Winter Calends. But there is no occasion to rest on this alone, as we have the evidence of Cormac’s Glossary that the month before the beginning of winter was the last month; so that the first day of the first month of winter was also the first day of the year.” That the November bonfire was recognised as heralding the dominion of the gods and spirits of darkness,[37] that the old ideas surrounding Horus and Set in Egypt were not forgotten, is evidenced by the fact that when it was extinct the whole company round it would suddenly take to their heels, shouting at the top of their voices:-- Yr hwch đu gwta | The cropped black sow A gipio ’r ola’! | Seize the hindmost!