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"Just as like as not some of those reckless kids with their bonfires have gone and done it!" ventured Steve Mullane, indignantly; "and now the people will begin to say how foolish it was to give up the town to this wild orgy of celebration, just because the boys of Chester won a game."
Swartboy would then rake off the cinders, take out the feet with a sharp wooden spit, beat them well to get rid of the dust, scrape the sand clear, then pare off the outside skin, when they would be ready either to be eaten or would keep for a long time. Swartboy would do all this as soon as the four huge bonfires should burn down.
This word comes from the name of Guy Fawkes, the Gunpowder Plotter, through the effigies, or "guys," which are often burned in bonfires on November 5th. Certain Christian names have, for reasons which it is not easy to see, given us words which mean "fool" or "stupid person." The word ninny comes from Innocent. Noddy probably comes from Nicodemus or Nicholas.
Here Sarah told me how the King dined at my Lady Castlemaine's, and supped, every day and night the last week; and that the night that the bonfires were made for joy of the Queen's arrivall, the King was there; but there was no fire at her door, though at all the rest of the doors almost in the street; which was much observed: and that the King and she did send for a pair of scales and weighed one another; and she, being with child, was said to be heaviest.
What a picking of raisins and rolling of pie crust, until every nook and corner of the immense storeroom was stocked with "savoury mince and toothsome pumpkin pies," while so great was the confusion that even the stolid red-hued servant, Indian Summer, lost his head, and smoked so continually he always appeared surrounded by a blue mist, as he piled logs upon the great bonfires in the yard, until they lighted up the whole country for miles around.
They were great bonfires burning in iron cages some forty feet up in the air. Those cages projected from the battlements of a massive, cut-stone wall. There was no light anywhere else underneath the stars. Thal rode almost underneath the cressets and shouted upward. A voice answered. Presently a gate clanked open and a black, cavelike opening appeared behind it.
The joy over him, not in Berlin Palace only, but in Berlin City, and over the Prussian Nation, was very great and universal; still testified in manifold dull, unreadable old pamphlets, records official and volunteer, which were then all ablaze like the bonfires, and are now fallen dark enough, and hardly credible even to the fancy of this new Time.
The people of Formentera, a lawless and God-forsaken crowd they were natives of a smaller island used to light bonfires to decoy the sailors, and when the ship was lost to them it was not lost to the islanders, for its spoils made many of them rich. A Febrer poor? Pèp would not accept the money Febrer offered him.
The next step was the building of bonfires, one at each corner of the roof, so that when the time for fighting came, the defenders might confound the enemy by lighting the surrounding desert, making a surprise impossible. Old barrels were broken up, therefore, and saturated with oil.
On the eve of the festival, huge bonfires, which should be lighted by striking two flints together, blaze on all the hills and knolls. Every large hamlet has its own fire, round which the young people dance in a ring. The old folk notice whether the flames incline to the north or to the south. In the former case, the spring will be cold and backward; in the latter, it will be mild and genial.
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