martyrs.

By its separation from the solemn character of the Druid festival,
All-hallow Eve lost much of its ancient dignity, and became the
carnival-night of the year for wild, grotesque rites. As century after
century passed by, it came to be spoken of as the time when the magic
powers, with which the peasantry, all the world over, filled the wastes
and ruins, were supposed to swarm abroad to help or injure men. It was
the time when those first dwellers in every land, the fairies, were said
to come out from their grots and lurking-places; and in the darkness of
the forests and the shadows of old ruins, witches and goblins gathered.
In course of time, the hallowing fire came to be considered a protection
against these malicious powers. It was a custom in the seventeenth
century for the master of a family to carry a lighted torch of straw
around his fields, to protect them from evil influence through the year,
and as he went he chanted an invocation to the fire. The chief thing
which we seek to impress upon your minds in connection with All-hallow
Eve is that its curious customs show how no generation of men is
altogether separated from earlier generations. Far as we think we are
from our uncivilized ancestors, much of what they did and thought has
come into our doing and thinking,--with many changes perhaps, under
different religious forms, and sometimes in jest where they were in
earnest. Still, these customs and observances (of which All-hallow Eve
is only one) may be called the piers, upon which rests a bridge that
spans the wide past between us and the generations that have gone
before.