Ireland, and parts of France were known as Celts, and that their
religion was directed by strange priests called Druids. Three times in
the year, on the first of May, for the sowing; at the solstice, June
21st, for the ripening and turn of the year; and on the eve of November
1st, for the harvesting, those mysterious priests of the Celts, the
Druids, built fires on the hill-tops in France, Britain, and Ireland, in
honor of the sun. At this last festival the Druids of all the region
gathered in their white robes around the stone altar or cairn on the
hill-top. Here stood an emblem of the sun, and on the cairn was a sacred
fire, which had been kept burning through the year. The Druids formed
about the fire, and, at a signal, quenched it, while deep silence rested
on the mountains and valleys. Then the new fire gleamed on the cairn,
the people in the valley raised a joyous shout, and from hill-top to
hill-top other fires answered the sacred flame. On this night, all
hearth-fires in the region had been put out, and they were kindled with
brands from the sacred fire, which was believed to guard the households
through the year.

But the Druids disappeared from their sacred places, the cairns on the
hill-tops became the monuments of a dead religion, and Christianity
spread to the barbarous inhabitants of France and the British Islands.
Yet the people still clung to their old customs, and felt much of the
old awe for them. Still they built their fires on the first of May,--at
the solstice in June,--and on the eve of November 1st. The church found
that it could not all at once separate the people from their old ways,
so it gradually turned these ways to its own use, and the harvest
festival of the Druids became in the Catholic Calendar the Eve of All
Saints, for that is the meaning of the name "All-hallow Eve." In the
seventh century, the Pantheon, the ancient Roman temple of all the gods,
was consecrated anew to the worship of the Virgin and of all holy