The salt with which they salted the holy meal was prepared with similar invariable formality. Crude salt, obtained from evaporated sea-water out of the sand-pits on the seashore near Lavinium, was conveyed to the Atrium in small two-handled earthenware jars. This coarse, dirty, dark-colored salt was dissolved by the three younger Vestals in boiling water, which water might not be obtained from the lead pipes which connected the Atrium with the general water-supply of the city’s aqueducts, but must be drawn by the Vestals themselves and carried by them in the earthenware jars from the famous fountain of Jaturna, at which Castor and Pollux were fabled to have watered their white horses after bringing to Rome the news of the victory at Lake Regillus. The solution was purified by repeated boilings, the impurities being gotten rid of by successive careful decantings of the liquid from one vessel into another, so that the sediment might be left behind as the top part was poured off. When sufficiently boiled down the solution was recrystallized in shallow earthenware pans. The resulting slabs of salt were harder than the pans and were freed from them by breaking the earthenware with an ancient stone hammer, said to have been captured by AEneas himself from a king of Ardea. The slabs of salt were sawed into pieces with an iron saw, the pieces were pounded in a mortar, the fine salt was thrown into an earthenware bowl and dried out in a kiln. When dried a little powdered gypsum was stirred through it to prevent it from again becoming moist. It was then stored in a tall jar with a tight lid, which was kept in the outer storeroom of the temple, along with the jars of meal. Three times a year, on the ninth of June, on the thirteenth of September and on the fifteenth of February, with solemn prayers the Vestals mixed the prepared salt with the prepared grits, the resultant mixture being the sacred meal. On each First of March the fire in the temple was allowed to go out and was solemnly rekindled by the friction of maple wood on apple wood, as when the fire went out by accident. The temple was then decorated with fresh boughs of green laurel, after the boughs put up the year before had been removed. On May fifteenth the Vestals were the chief figures in a solemn procession of the entire Roman hierarchy to the Sublician bridge, from which the Vestals threw into the Tiber thirty dolls made of rushes, fifteen representing men, fifteen women, each about two feet high. This offering to the river of effigies of men and women commemorated the primitive human sacrifices by which the river was each year placated, that it might not drown more by floods.