not that cares afflicted
me, my real affliction was my wife," ending, "Love will I make to
the girls across the stream." Next comes a wife who poisons her
husband: "I dried the evil root, and pounded it small;" but in
this case the husband was hated because he had killed her brother.
The most unpleasant of all, however, are the invocations to _vodki_.
A circle of girls imitate drunken women, and sing as they dance:
"_Vodki_ delicious I drank, I drank; not in a cup or a glass, but a
bucketful I drank.... I cling to the posts of the door. Oh, doorpost,
hold me up, the drunken woman, the tipsy rogue."

The account of the Baba Zaga, a hideous old witch, is enough to
drive children into convulsions. She has a nose and teeth made
of strong sharp iron. As she lies in her hut she stretches from
one corner to the other, and her nose goes through the roof. The
fence is made of the bones of the people she has eaten, and tipped
with their skulls. The uprights of the gate are human legs. She
has a broom to sweep away the traces of her passage over the snow
in her seven-leagued boots. She steals children to eat them.

Remains of paganism are to be found in some of the sayings. A curse
still existing says, "May Perun (_i. e._, the lightning) strike
thee." The god Perun, the Thunderer, resembles Thor, and like him
carries a hammer. He has been transformed into Elijah, the prophet
Ilya, the rumbling of whose chariot as he rolls through heaven,
especially on the week in summer when his festival falls, may be
heard in thunder. There is a dismal custom by which the children are
made to eat the mouldy bread, "because the Rusalkas (the fairies)
do not choose bread to be wasted." Inhuman stories about burying
a child alive in the foundation of a new town to propitiate the
earth spirit; that a drowning man must not be saved, lest the water
spirit be offended; that if groans or cries are heard in the forest,
a traveller must go straight on without paying any attention, "for
it is only the wood demon, the lyeshey," seem only to be invented
as excuses for selfish inaction. Wolves bear a great part in the
stories. A peasant driving in a sledge with three children is pursued
by a pack of wolves: he throws out a child, which they stop to
devour; then the howls come near him again, and he throws out a
second; again they return, when the last is sacrificed; and one
is grieved to hear that he saves his own wretched cowardly life
at last.

The Ema