of its attire; the naked straw bundle is then thrown out of the window to the boys, who carry it off and fling it into the nearest stream. This is the first act of the drama. In the second, one of the girls is solemnly invested with the clothes and ornaments previously worn by the figure of Death, and, like it, is led in procession round the village to the singing of the same hymns as before. The ceremony ends with a feast at the house of the girl who acted the chief part; as before, the boys are excluded. “According to popular belief, it is allowed to eat fruit only after this day, as now the ‘Death,’ that is, the unwholesomeness—has been expelled from them. Also the river in which the Death has been drowned may now be considered fit for public bathing. If this ceremony be neglected in the village where it is customary, such neglect is supposed to entail death to one of the young people, or loss of virtue to a girl.”(874) In the first of these two ceremonies the tree which is brought home after the destruction of the figure of Death is plainly equivalent to the trees or branches which, in the preceding customs, were brought back as representatives of Summer or Life, after Death had been thrown away or destroyed. But the transference of the shirt worn by the effigy of Death to the tree clearly indicates that the tree is a kind of revivification, in a new form, of the destroyed effigy.(875) This comes out also in the Transylvanian custom; the dressing of a girl in the clothes worn by the Death, and the leading her about the village to the same songs which had been sung when the Death was being carried about, show that she is intended to be a kind of resuscitation of the being whose effigy has just been destroyed. These examples therefore suggest that the Death whose demolition is represented in these ceremonies cannot be regarded as the purely destructive agent which we understand by Death. If the tree which is brought back as an embodiment of the reviving vegetation of spring is clothed in the shirt worn by the Death which has been just destroyed, the object certainly cannot be to check and counteract the revival of vegetation; it can only be to foster and promote it. Therefore the being which has just been destroyed—the so-called Death—must be supposed to be endowed with a vivifying and quickening influence, which it can communicate to the vegetable and even the animal world. This ascription of a life-giving virtue to the figure of Death is put beyond a doubt by the custom, observed in some places, of taking pieces of the straw effigy of Death and placing them in the fields to make the crops grow, or in the manger to make the cattle thrive. Thus in Spachendorf (Austrian Silesia) the figure of Death made of straw, brushwood, and rags, is carried out with wild songs to an open place outside the village and there burned, and while it is burning a general struggle takes place for the pieces, which are pulled out of the flames with bare hands.