dancing round the fires, as those who have been present have told me.”(504) Down to the early part of the nineteenth century bonfires called Beal-fires used to be lit on Midsummer Eve all over the wolds in the East Riding of Yorkshire.(505) (M168) In Herefordshire and Somersetshire the peasants used to make fires in the fields on Midsummer Eve “to bless the apples.”(506) In Devonshire the custom of leaping over the midsummer fires was also observed.(507) “In Cornwall, the festival fires, called bonfires, are kindled on the Eves of St. John Baptist and St. Peter’s day; and Midsummer is thence, in the Cornish tongue, called _Goluan_, which signifies both light and rejoicing. At these fires the Cornish attend with lighted torches, tarred and pitched at the end, and make their perambulations round their fires, going from village to village and carrying their torches before them; this is certainly the remains of Druid superstition; for, _Faces praeferre_, to carry lighted torches was reckoned a kind of gentilism, and as such particularly prohibited by the Gallick Councils.”(508) At Penzance and elsewhere in the county the people danced and sang about the bonfires on Midsummer Eve. On Whiteborough, a large tumulus near Launceston, a huge bonfire used to be kindled on Midsummer Eve; a tall summer pole with a large bush at the top was fixed in the centre of the bonfire.(509) The Cornish fires at this season appear to have been commonly lit on high and conspicuous hills, such as Tregonan, Godolphin, Carnwarth, and Carn Brea. When it grew dusk on Midsummer Eve, old men would hobble away to some height whence they counted the fires and drew a presage from their number.(510) “It is the immemorial usage in Penzance, and the neighbouring towns and villages, to kindle bonfires and torches on Midsummer-eve; and on Midsummer-day to hold a fair on Penzance quay, where the country folks assemble from the adjoining parishes in great numbers to make excursions on the water. St. Peter’s Eve [the twenty-eighth of June] is distinguished by a similar display of bonfires and torches, although the ‘quay-fair’ on St. Peter’s-day [the twenty-ninth of June], has been discontinued upwards of forty years. On these eves a line of tar-barrels, relieved occasionally by large bonfires, is seen in the centre of each of the principal streets in Penzance. On either side of this line young men and women pass up and down, swinging round their heads heavy torches made of large pieces of folded canvas steeped in tar, and nailed to the ends of sticks between three and four feet long; the flames of some of these almost equal those of the tar-barrels. Rows of lighted candles, also, when the air is calm, are fixed outside the windows or along the sides of the streets. In St. Just, and other mining parishes, the young miners, mimicking their fathers’ employments, bore rows of holes in the rocks, load them with gunpowder, and explode them in rapid succession by trains of the same substance.