1889.] 41 [Mooney. 



away, the whole crowd of defeated friendly rivals following after in 

 prideful acclamation. And here they came with wild whoop and hurroo, 

 carrying their prize on their shoulders into the great room, where the 

 procession was received with ringing cheers. It was old Billj- Drain, the 

 blind fiddler, all the way from Belfast ; hero now above all pedagogues 

 and strangers ; hatless, coatless, breathless from the odd melee, but with 

 pursed and smiling mouth and positive radiance shining from his white 

 locks and beaming from his blinking upraised and sightless old eyes. 

 Was there a dance this Hallowe'en night at that farmhouse on the ancient 

 Kilmacrenan road ? Ask the rafters of oak that shivered a century's 

 splinters and mould upon the vaulting heads and heels of this big-hearted 

 Irish peasantry. And ask the stars that looked softly down until their 

 shining eyes went out in the brighter dawn which lifted flaming cones 

 upon the peaks of fair Glendowan." * 



Saint Martin's Day, November 11. 



We come now to Saint Martin's day, a festival which for some reason 

 seems to be connected with animal sacrifice throughout Christian Europe. 

 Among the ancient Greeks this day was the beginning of the Vinalia or 

 feast of Bacchus, which lasted four days and was a season of public 

 carousing, being considerd the time for trying the new wine, but there 

 is no mention of sacrifices. In modern Europe also it is — or was — a time 

 for testing the new wine and for feasting, drinking and public sports, but, 

 in addition to this, we find among all the northern nations traces of sacri- 

 fice, which may hav come down from the old Teutonic and Keltic relig- 

 ions. With the more practical moderns, this rite has generally degener- 

 ated into a simple provision of the winter's meat. On the continent, the 

 animal commonly selected to die on this occasion is a goose, a preference 

 for which the Norse assign a legendary reason. In England, the goose is 

 kild on Saint Michael's day, September 29, while Saint Martin's day is 

 considerd about the proper time to kil beef and hogs for winter, whence 

 it comes that a beef is calld a marten in the north of England. In Gaelic 

 Ireland, a beef cow is calld a mart (jnarth). In England, it is said that 

 on this night water is changed to wine, a belief transferd in Ireland to 

 Twelfth-night, while in both countries it is held that on this day "No 

 beam doth swinge, nor wheel go round," 



Saint Martin, who has been styled the second apostle of France, came 

 of a noble family in Pannonia, now included under the government of 

 Hungary. By his father, he was designd for the military profession, but 

 this life was distasteful to him, and he became a religieux, being finally 

 appointed bishop of Tours. He died, surrounded by his clerical com- 

 panions, about the year 397. In the history of his life, even as related in 

 Butler's "Lives of the Saints," a work which deals largely in the mar- 

 velous, we find nothing to account for the strange legends and practices 



* Edgar L. Wakeman, Afoot in Ireland, in Washington (D. C.) Evening Star, Nov. 17, 

 1888. 



