ts."[50]

There is another story of this class which is worthy of being
mentioned, as it illustrates a custom in which the Russians differ
from some other peoples.

A certain man had married a wife who was so capricious that there was
no living with her. After trying all sorts of devices her dejected
husband at last asked her how she had been brought up, and learnt that
she had received an education almost entirely German and French, with
scarcely any Russian in it; she had not even been wrapped in
swaddling-clothes when a baby, nor swung in a _liulka_.[51] Thereupon
her husband determined to remedy the short-comings of her early
education, and "whenever she showed herself capricious, or took to
squalling, he immediately had her swaddled and placed in a _liulka_,
and began swinging her to and fro." By the end of a half year she
became "quite silky"--all her caprices had been swung out of her.

But instead of giving mere extracts from any more of the numerous
stories to which the fruitful subject of woman's caprice has given
rise, we will quote a couple of such tales at length. The first is the
Russian variant of a story which has a long family tree, with
ramifications extending over a great part of the world. Dr. Benfey has
devoted to it no less than sixteen pages of his introduction to the
Panchatantra,[52] tracing it from its original Indian home, and its
subsequent abode in Persia, into almost every European land.

THE BAD WIFE.[53]

A bad wife lived on the worst of terms with her husband, and
never paid any attention to what he said. If her husband told
her to get up early, she would lie in bed three days at a stretch;
if he wanted her to go to sleep, she couldn't think of sleeping.
When her husband asked her to make pancakes, she would say:
"You thief, you don't deserve a pancake!"

If he said:

"Don't make any pancakes, wife, if I don't deserve them,"
she would cook a two-gallon pot full, and say,

"Eat away, you thief, till they're all gone!"

"Now then, wife," perhaps he would say, "I feel quite sorry
for you; don't go toiling and moiling, and don't go out to the
hay cutting."

"No, no, you thief!" she would reply, "I shall go, and do
you follow after me!"

One day, after having had his trouble and bother with her
he went into the forest to look for berries and distract his grief,
and he came to where there was a currant bush, and in the middle
of that bu