The Floral Oracle. 
335 
in a position where it may readily be found in the dark; they 
then return home and await the approach of midnight. Just 
before twelve o’clock strikes they once more proceed to the 
church, and the one who seeks to learn her fate remains in the 
porch until the hour has struck: the girl’s friends are permitted 
to accompany her as far as the gate of the churchyard, but 
beyond that she must perform her adventurous journey alone. 
When she gains the bouquet she beholds, if she is to be married 
within the year, a wedding procession pass by, with a bride in 
her own likeness, walking with that of her future husband: as 
many bridesmen and maidens as she sees following the bridal 
pair, so many months will elapse before the foreshadowed 
wedding. If she is to die unmarried, then the expected pro¬ 
cession will be a funeral, consisting of a coffin covered with a 
white pall, and borne on the shoulders of twelve seeming head¬ 
less phantoms. 
In a fiction attributed to Hannah More, it is related that, 
among other superstitious practices of a certain Sally Evans' 
‘‘she would never go to bed on Midsummer-eve without stick¬ 
ing up in her room the well-known plant called midsummer 
mew, as the bending of the leaves to the right or to the left 
would never fail to tell her whether her lover was true or false.” 
The plant here alluded to is better known as orpine, and the 
above custom is thus adverted to in the “Cottage Girl,” a poem 
purporting to have been written on Midsummer-eve, 1786: 
“ The rustic maid invokes her swain, “ Oft on the shrub she casts her eye, 
And hails, to pensive damsels dear, That spoke her true-love’s secret sVh, 
Tins eve, though direst of the year. Or else, alas! too plainly told 
***** Her true-love’s faithless heart was cold.” 
Such floral customs, as everyone knows, are not confined to 
one particular nation or one especial district, but are practised 
with unimportant alterations in every country of the globe, 
and by all peoples. 
