After the Vestalia the Vestals were present at the Consualia and the festival of Ops Consiva in August, which, as we shall see, were probably harvest festivals; and on the Ides of October the blood of the ‘October horse’ was deposited in their care for use at the Fordicidia as a charm for fertility. So constant is the connexion of Vesta with the fruits of the earth, that it is not surprising that some Roman scholars[614] should have considered her an earth goddess; especially as, in a volcanic region, the proper home of fire would be thought to be beneath the earth. But such explanations, and also the views of modern scholars who have sought to find in Vesta a deity of abstract ideas, such as ‘the nourishing element in the fire’[615], are really superfluous. The associations which grew up around the sacred hearth-fire can all be traced to the original germ, if it be borne in mind that the fire, the provision-store, and the protecting deities of that store, were all placed together in the centre of the house, and that all domestic operations, sacrificial or culinary, took place at or by means of, the necessary fire. ‘What is home but another word for cooking?’ Nor must we forget that the living fire was for primitive man a mysterious thing, and invested from the first with divine attributes[616]. 2. The fact that from the 5th to the 15th the days were not only _nefasti_ but also _religiosi_ is not easy to explain. It is true that in two other months, February and April, we find a parallel series of _dies nefasti_ in the first half of the month; in February it extended from the Kalends to the Lupercalia (15th), and in April from the Nones to the Vinalia (23rd)[617]. But these days in February and April were _nefasti_ in the ordinary sense of the word, i. e. the cessation of judicial business, and we are not told of them that they were also _religiosi_, or that the Flaminica Dialis lay during them under any special restrictions, as in the days we are speaking of. On the other hand, we find to our surprise that the other days on which this priestess was forbidden to comb hair or cut nails were not even _nefasti_ in the ordinary sense, viz. those of the ‘moving’ of the _ancilia_ and of the ceremony of the Argei[618]: so that we are baffled at every point in looking for a solution to the calendar.