Each one who secures a fragment of the effigy ties it to a branch of the largest tree in his garden, or buries it in his field, in the belief that this causes the crops to grow better.(876) In the Troppau district (Austrian Silesia) the straw figure which the boys make on the Fourth Sunday in Lent is dressed by the girls in woman’s clothes and hung with ribbons, necklace, and garlands. Attached to a long pole it is carried out of the village, followed by a troop of young people of both sexes, who alternately frolic, lament, and sing songs. Arrived at its destination—a field outside the village—the figure is stripped of its clothes and ornaments; then the crowd rushes on it and tears it to bits, scuffling for the fragments. Every one tries to get a wisp of the straw of which the effigy was made, because such a wisp, placed in the manger, is believed to make the cattle thrive.(877) Or the straw is put in the hens’ nest, it being supposed that this prevents the hens from carrying away their eggs, and makes them brood much better.(878) The same attribution of a fertilising power to the figure of Death appears in the belief that if the bearers of the figure, after throwing it away, meet cattle and strike them with their sticks, this will render the cattle prolific.(879) Perhaps the sticks had been previously used to beat the Death,(880) and so had acquired the fertilising power ascribed to the effigy. In Leipzig at Mid-Lent men and women of the lowest class used to carry through all the streets a straw effigy of Death, which they exhibited to young wives, and finally threw into the river, alleging that this made young wives fruitful, cleansed the city, and averted the plague and other sickness from the inhabitants for that year.(881)