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Updated: May 31, 2025
In Austrian Silesia the custom also prevails of lighting great bonfires on hilltops on Midsummer Eve, and here too the boys swing blazing besoms or hurl them high in the air, while they shout and leap and dance wildly. Next morning every door is decked with flowers and birchen saplings.
When Government did not sit at the Raad Zaal, Blinders, as calmly as any ordinary being might have done, dispensed jalap, castor-oil, and pill-stick over the counter of his store. These are the three heroic besoms employed by enlightened and conscientious Boer housewives for sweeping out the interiors of their families. Pill-stick is rhubarb-pill in the concrete.
Tired and faint she sinks into a chair, bewailing the lot of the poor man's wife, with empty cupboards and hungry mouths to be fed. Soon Peter's voice is heard singing in the distance. He has had a good sale for his besoms, and comes back laden with good cheer.
And all the time there were invisible hands beating my back black and blue. More than that; all round me, wherever I turned, the place was swarming with Tussmanns waltzing with their arms round besoms. At last I fell down exhausted, and lost my consciousness. When the light shone into my eyes in the morning oh, Bosswinkel, share my terror!
In the afternoon boys go about with handcarts from house to house collecting fuel, such as sticks, brushwood, old besoms, and so forth. They make their request at each house in rhyming verses, threatening with evil consequences the curmudgeons who refuse them a dole.
When the seed has been shaken from the plant, the tops are brought together, and form those excellent besoms which, throughout southern Europe, supply the place of birch-broom, than which they are more elastic, not so brittle, and much cleaner.
One inhabitant made heather brooms, or besoms, as they are called here. He goes to the mountain, cuts heather, draws it home on his back, makes the besoms, and sells them for a halfpenny apiece. In one hovel a little boy lay dying of consumption another name for cold and hunger his bed a few rags, a bit of sacking and a tattered coat the only bed-clothes.
She showed the two youths the little house she lived in while she was there. It was filled with the heather-stalks which she bound together for besoms.
"I'm sure when I heard they'd been forbid I felt as glad as if anybody had gied me sixpence," said an earnest voice that of Olly Dowden, a woman who lived by making heath brooms, or besoms. Her nature was to be civil to enemies as well as to friends, and grateful to all the world for letting her remain alive. "And now the maid have married him just the same," said Humphrey.
Certainly witches are constantly thought to ride through the air on broomsticks or other equally convenient vehicles; and if they do so, how can you get at them so effectually as by hurling lighted missiles, whether discs, torches, or besoms, after them as they flit past overhead in the gloom?
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