sorcery.(189) It is curious to find that in China a similar use is, or was formerly, made of mugwort at the same season of the year. In an old Chinese calendar we read that “on the fifth day of the fifth month the four classes of the people gambol in the herbage, and have competitive games with plants of all kinds. They pluck mugwort and make dolls of it, which they suspend over their gates and doors, in order to expel poisonous airs or influences.”(190) On this custom Professor J. J. M. de Groot observes: “Notice that the plant owed its efficacy to the time when it was plucked: a day denoting the midsummer festival, when light and fire of the universe are in their apogee.”(191) On account of this valuable property mugwort is used by Chinese surgeons in cautery.(192) The Ainos of Japan employ bunches of mugwort in exorcisms, “because it is thought that demons of disease dislike the smell and flavour of this herb.”(193) It is an old German belief that he who carries mugwort in his shoes will not grow weary.(194) In Mecklenburg, they say that if you will dig up a plant of mugwort at noon on Midsummer Day, you will find under the root a burning coal, which vanishes away as soon as the church bells have ceased to ring. If you find the coal and carry it off in silence, it will prove a remedy for all sorts of maladies.(195) According to another German superstition, such a coal will turn to gold.(196) English writers record the popular belief that a rare coal is to be found under the root of mugwort at a single hour of a single day in the year, namely, at noon or midnight on Midsummer Eve, and that this coal will protect him who carries it on his person from plague, carbuncle, lightning, fever, and ague.(197) In Eastern Prussia, on St. John’s Eve, people can foretell a marriage by means of mugwort; they bend two stalks of the growing plant outward, and then observe whether the stalks, after straightening themselves again, incline towards each other or not.(198) (M47) A similar mode of divination has been practised both in England and in Germany with the orpine (_Sedum telephium_), a plant which grows on a gravelly or chalky soil about hedges, the borders of fields, and on bushy hills. It flowers in August, and the blossoms consist of dense clustered tufts of crimson or purple petals; sometimes, but rarely, the flowers are white.(199) In England the plant is popularly known as Midsummer Men, because people used to plant slips of them in pairs on Midsummer Eve, one slip standing for a young man and the other for a young woman. If the plants, as they grew up, bent towards each other, the couple would marry; if either of them withered, he or she whom it represented would die.(200) In Masuren, Westphalia, and Switzerland the method of forecasting the future by means of the orpine is precisely the same.(201)