ater. A suitor comes to woo her. She
waxes wroth and cries,

Whom wishes he to woo?
The sister of the Sun,
The cousin of the Moon,
The adopted-sister of the Dawn.

Then she flings down three golden apples, which the
"marriage-proposers" attempt to catch, but "three lightnings flash
from the sky" and kill the suitor and his friends.

In another Servian song a girl cries to the Sun--

O brilliant Sun! I am fairer than thou,
Than thy brother, the bright Moon,
Than thy sister, the moving star [Venus?].

In South-Slavonian poetry the sun often figures as a radiant youth.
But among the Northern Slavonians, as well as the Lithuanians, the sun
was regarded as a female being, the bride of the moon. "Thou askest me
of what race, of what family I am," says the fair maiden of a song
preserved in the Tambof Government--

My mother is--the beauteous Sun,
And my father--the bright Moon;
My brothers are--the many Stars,
And my sisters--the white Dawns.[223]

A far more detailed account might be given of the Witch and her near
relation the Baba Yaga, as well as of those masculine embodiments of
that spirit of evil which is personified in them, the Snake, Koshchei,
and other similar beings. But the stories which have been quoted will
suffice to give at least a general idea of their moral and physical
attributes. We will now turn from their forms, so constantly
introduced into the skazka-drama, to some of the supernatural figures
which are not so often brought upon the stage--to those mythical
beings of whom (numerous as may be the traditions about them) the
regular "story" does not so often speak, to such personifications of
abstract ideas as are less frequently employed to set its conventional
machinery in motion.

FOOTNOTES:

[72] "Songs of the Russian People," pp. 160-185.

[73] In one story (Khudyakof, No. 117) there are snakes with
twenty-eight and twenty-nine heads, but this is unusual.

[74] Afanasief, ii. No. 30. From the Chernigof Government. The accent
falls on the second syllable of Ivan, on the first of Popyalof.

[75] _Popyal_, provincial word for _pepel_ = ashes, cinders, whence
the surname Popyalof. A pood is about 40lbs.

[76] On slender supports.

[77] _Pod mostom_, _i.e._, says Afanasief (vol. v. p. 243), under the
raised flooring which, in an _izba_, serves as a sleeping place.

[78] _Zatvelyef_, apparently a provincial word.

[79] The Russian word _k