while they bathe they utter never a word. Moreover, the Calabrians keep the “new water” as a sacred thing. They believe that it serves as a protection against witchcraft if it is sprinkled on a fire or a lamp, when the wood crackles or the wick sputters; for they regard it as a bad omen when the fire talks, as they say.(309) Among the Germans of Western Bohemia, also, water as well as fire is consecrated by the priest in front of the church on Easter Saturday. People bring jugs full of water to the church and set them beside the holy fire; afterwards they use the water to sprinkle on the palm-branches which are stuck in the fields. Charred sticks of the Judas fire, as it is popularly called, are supposed to possess a magical and healing virtue; hence the people take them home with them, and even scuffle with each other for the still glowing embers in order to carry them, still glimmering, to their houses and so obtain “the light” or “the holy light.”(310) At Hildesheim, also, and the neighbouring villages of central Germany rites both of fire and water are or were till lately observed at Easter. Thus on Easter night many people fetch water from the Innerste river and keep it carefully, believing it to be a remedy for many sorts of ailments both of man and beast. In the villages on the Leine river servant men and maids used to go silently on Easter night between the hours of eleven and twelve and silently draw water in buckets from the river; they mixed the water with the fodder and the drink of the cattle to make the animals thrive, and they imagined that to wash in it was good for human beings. Many were also of opinion that at the same mystic hour the water turned to wine as far as the crowing of a cock could be heard, and in this belief they laid themselves flat on their stomachs and kept their tongues in the water till the miraculous change occurred, when they took a great gulp of the transformed water. At Hildesheim, too, and the neighbouring villages fires used to blaze on all the heights on Easter Eve; and embers taken from the bonfires were dipped in the cattle troughs to benefit the beasts and were kept in the houses to avert lightning.(311) (M101) In the Lesachthal, Carinthia, all the fires in the houses used to be extinguished on Easter Saturday, and rekindled with a fresh fire brought from the churchyard, where the priest had lit it by the friction of flint and steel and had bestowed his blessing on it.(312) Such customs were probably widespread. In a Latin poem of the sixteenth century, written by a certain Thomas Kirchmeyer and translated into English by Barnabe Googe, we read:—