Moujik get such a lot of grain?"

"Bless me! Why, every one of his sheaves gave him a
peck of grain. When he began to thresh he never put more
than one sheaf at a time on the threshing-floor."

"Ah, brother Nicholas!" said Elijah, guessing the truth,
"it's you who go and tell the Moujik everything!"

"What an idea! that I should go and tell--"

"As you please; that's your doing! But that Moujik sha'n't
forget me in a hurry!"

"Why, what are you going to do to him?"

"What I shall do, that I won't tell you," replies Elijah.

"There's a great danger coming," thinks St. Nicholas, and
he goes to the Moujik again, and says:

"Buy two tapers, a big one and a little one, and do thus
and thus with them."

Well, next day the Prophet Elijah and St. Nicholas were
walking along together in the guise of wayfarers, and they met
the Moujik, who was carrying two wax tapers--one, a big
rouble one, and the other, a tiny copeck one.

"Where are you going, Moujik?" asked St. Nicholas.

"Well, I'm going to offer a rouble taper to Prophet Elijah;
he's been ever so good to me! When my crops were ruined
by the hail, he bestirred himself like anything, and gave me
a plentiful harvest, twice as good as the other would have
been."

"And the copeck taper, what's that for?"

"Why, that's for Nicholas!" said the peasant and passed
on.

"There now, Elijah!" says Nicholas, "you say I go and
tell everything to the Moujik--surely you can see for yourself
how much truth there is in that!"

Thereupon the matter ended. Elijah was appeased and
didn't threaten to hurt the Moujik any more. And the Moujik
led a prosperous life, and from that time forward he held in
equal honor Elijah's Day and Nicholas's Day.

It is not always to the Prophet Ilya that the power once attributed to
Perun is now ascribed. The pagan wielder of the thunderbolt is
represented in modern traditions by more than one Christian saint.
Sometimes, as St. George, he transfixes monsters with his lance;
sometimes, as St. Andrew, he smites with his mace a spot given over to
witchcraft. There was a village (says one of the legends of the
Chernigof Government) in which lived more than a thousand witches, and
they used to steal the holy stars, until at last "there was not one
left to light our sinful world." Then God sent the holy Andrew, who
struck with his mace--and all that village was swallowed up by th