84 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



where tliey are arranged in rows or groups, the schoolboys and 

 schoolgirls being in charge of their respective teachers, as if they 

 were going on a picnic. At a given signal the musicians strike 

 up the lively tune known as " Willibrord's Dance," and the salta- 

 tory movement begins, the whole mass moving three or four steps 

 forward and one or two steps backward, or four steps to the right 

 and the same number to the left in a diagonal direction, thus 

 advancing, as it were, on the hypothenuse instead of on the per- 

 pendicular of a triangle. From a distance, the bobbing and 

 swaying throng resembles the swell and fall of a restless sea, or 

 the bubbling of boiling water in an immense caldron. In this 

 manner the procession moves on for more than two hours through 

 the streets of the town and up the sixty-two steps leading to the 

 parish church, where the dance is kept up for some time around 

 the tomb of St. Willibrord. The dancers join hands, or more 

 frequently hold together by means of a handkerchief, for the sake 

 of greater freedom of motion. Here and there an old man may 

 be seen dragging along an infirm son, who makes desperate at- 

 tempts to leap with the rest, or a stout woman gasping and sweat- 

 ing under the heavy burden of a paralytic daughter, whom she 

 bears in her arms as she bounds to and fro. 



Many legends are afloat concerning the origin of this custom. 

 Thus it is said that in the latter half of the eighth century a 

 sort of epizootic chorea broke out in the region round about 

 Echternach, and caused all the horses, cows, sheep, and goats to 

 dance in their stalls and to refuse to eat. As no medicine gave 

 relief, the people made a vow that they would dance round the 

 grave of St. Willibrord, and no sooner was this vow fulfilled than 

 the plague ceased, apparently in accordance with the homoeopathic 

 principle saltus saltibus curantur. Another tradition connects 

 it with the pestilence known as the black death, which prevailed 

 about the middle of the fourteenth century. In all probability, 

 however, it is a survival of the old pagan feast which was cele- 

 brated at the summer solstice in honor of the sun, and changed 

 by Willibrord into a Christian festival. This policy of adopting 

 heathen observances that could not be easily abolished was urged 

 by Pope Gregory the Great as early as the sixth century, in his 

 famous letter to the Benedictine Augustine, first Bishop of Can- 

 terbury, and followed by Boniface, Willibrord, and all the other 

 Anglo-Saxon missionaries to the German tribes. It was due to 

 this prudent spirit of compromise that the feast of Ostara, the 

 German goddess of spring, was transformed into Easter, and the 

 nativity of John the Baptist, the herald of the Sun of Righteous- 

 ness, was placed on June 24th, so as to correspond with the pagan 

 festivities of midsummer. 



In Italy the belief in the baneful power of " the evil eye," or 



