consequence receive being held to improve the crop.”(826) Again, the idea of our European peasants that the corn will grow well as far as the blaze of the bonfire is visible,(827) may be interpreted as a remnant of the belief in the quickening and fertilizing power of the bonfires. The same belief, it may be argued, reappears in the notion that embers taken from the bonfires and inserted in the fields will promote the growth of the crops,(828) and it may be thought to underlie the customs of sowing flax-seed in the direction in which the flames blow,(829) of mixing the ashes of the bonfire with the seed-corn at sowing,(830) of scattering the ashes by themselves over the field to fertilize it,(831) and of incorporating a piece of the Yule log in the plough to make the seeds thrive.(832) The opinion that the flax or hemp will grow as high as the flames rise or the people leap over them(833) belongs clearly to the same class of ideas. Again, at Konz, on the banks of the Moselle, if the blazing wheel which was trundled down the hillside reached the river without being extinguished, this was hailed as a proof that the vintage would be abundant. So firmly was this belief held that the successful performance of the ceremony entitled the villagers to levy a tax upon the owners of the neighbouring vineyards.(834) Here the unextinguished wheel might be taken to represent an unclouded sun, which in turn would portend an abundant vintage. So the waggon-load of white wine which the villagers received from the vineyards round about might pass for a payment for the sunshine which they had procured for the grapes. Similarly we saw that in the Vale of Glamorgan a blazing wheel used to be trundled down hill on Midsummer Day, and that if the fire were extinguished before the wheel reached the foot of the hill, the people expected a bad harvest; whereas if the wheel kept alight all the way down and continued to blaze for a long time, the farmers looked forward to heavy crops that summer.(835) Here, again, it is natural to suppose that the rustic mind traced a direct connexion between the fire of the wheel and the fire of the sun, on which the crops are dependent.