LITMIR.BIZ

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      “I know nothing of the kind.”

      “You lie, you scoundrel! Since you made my old woman young, make me young too; otherwise, there will be no living with her for me.”

      “Why I haven’t so much as seen your good lady.”

      “Your journeyman saw her, and that’s just the same thing. If he knew how to do the job, surely you, an old hand, must have learnt how to do it long ago. Come, now, set to work at once. If you don’t, it will be the worse for you. I’ll have you rubbed down with a birch-tree towel.”

      The Smith was compelled to try his hand at transforming the seigneur. He held a private conversation with the coachman as to how his journeyman had set to work with the lady, and what he had done to her, and then he thought:—

      “So be it! I’ll do the same. If I fall on my feet, good; if I don’t, well, I must suffer all the same!”

      So he set to work at once, stripped the seigneur naked, laid hold of him by the legs with the tongs, popped him into the furnace, and began blowing the bellows. After he had burnt him to a cinder, he collected his remains, flung them into the milk, and then waited to see how soon a youthful seigneur would jump out of it. He waited one hour, two hours. But nothing came of it. He made a search in the tub. There was nothing in it but bones, and those charred ones.

       Just then the lady sent messengers to the smithy, to ask whether the seigneur would soon be ready. The poor Smith had to reply that the seigneur was no more.

      When the lady heard that the Smith had only turned her husband into a cinder, instead of making him young, she was tremendously angry, and she called together her trusty servants, and ordered them to drag him to the gallows. No sooner said than done. Her servants ran to the Smith’s house, laid hold of him, tied his hands together, and dragged him off to the gallows. All of a sudden there came up with them the youngster who used to live with the Smith as his journeyman, who asked him:—

      “Where are they taking you, master?”

      “They’re going to hang me,” replied the Smith, and straightway related all that had happened to him.

      “Well, uncle!” said the Demon, “swear that you will never strike me with your hammer, but that you will pay me the same respect your father always paid, and the seigneur shall be alive, and young, too, in a trice.”

      The Smith began promising and swearing that he would never again lift his hammer against the Demon, but would always pay him every attention. Thereupon the journeyman hastened to the smithy, and shortly afterwards came back again, bringing the seigneur with him, and crying to the servants:

      “Hold! hold! Don’t hang him! Here’s your master!”

      Then they immediately untied the cords, and let the Smith go free.

From that time forward the Smith gave up spitting at the Demon and striking him with his hammer. The journeyman disappeared, and was never seen again. But the seigneur and his lady entered upon a prosperous course of life, and if they haven’t died, they’re living still.[71]

      FOOTNOTES:

       Table of Contents

      [11] Dasent’s “Popular Tales from the Norse,” p. xl.

      [12] Max Müller, “Chips,” vol. ii. p. 226.

[13] Take as an illustration of these remarks the close of the story of “Helena the Fair” (No. 34, Chap. IV.). See how light and bright it is (or at least was, before it was translated).

[14] I speak only of what I have seen. In some districts of Russia, if one may judge from pictures, the peasants occupy ornamented and ornamental dwellings.

[15] Khudyakof, vol. ii. p. 65.

[16] Khudyakof, vol. ii. p. 115.

[17] For a description of such social gatherings see the “Songs of the Russian People,” pp. 32–38.

[18] Afanasief, vi. No. 66.

[19] Cakes of unleavened flour flavored with garlic.

[20] The Nechistol, or unclean. (Chisty = clean, pure, &c.)

[21] Literally, “on thee no face is to be seen.”

[22] I do not propose to comment at any length upon the stories quoted in the present chapter. Some of them will be referred to farther on. Marusia’s demon lover will be recognized as akin to Arabian Ghouls, or the Rákshasas of Indian mythology. (See the story of Sidi Norman in the “Thousand and One Nights,” also Lane’s translation, vol. i., p. 32; and the story of Asokadatta and Vijayadatta in the fifth book of the “Kathásaritságara,” Brockhaus’s translation, 1843, vol. ii. pp. 142–159.) For transformations of a maiden into a flower or tree, see Grimm, No. 76, “Die Nelke,” and the notes to that story in vol. iii., p. 125—Hahn, No. 21, “Das Lorbeerkind,” etc. “The Water of Life,” will meet with due consideration in the fourth chapter. The Holy Water which destroys the Fiend is merely a Christian form of the “Water of Death,” viewed in its negative aspect.

[23] Chudinsky, No. 3.

[24] Afanasief, vi. p. 325. Wolfs “Niederlandische Sagen,” No. 326, quoted in Thorpe’s “Northern Mythology,” i. 292. Note 4.

[25] A number of ghost stories, and some remarks about the ideas of the Russian peasants with respect to the dead, will be found in Chap. V. Scott mentions a story in “The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,” vol. ii. p. 223, of a widower who believed he was haunted by his dead wife. On one occasion the ghost, to prove her identity, gave suck to her surviving infant.

[26] Afanasief, viii. p. 165.

[27] In West-European stories the devil frequently carries off a witch’s soul after death. Here the fiend enters the corpse, or rather its skin, probably intending to reappear as a vampire. Compare Bleek’s “Reynard the Fox in South Africa,” No. 24, in which a lion squeezes itself into the skin of a girl it has killed. I have generally rendered by “demon,” instead of “devil,” the word chort when it occurs in stories of this class, as the spirits to which they refer are manifestly akin to those of oriental demonology.

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