ey all set to work laying out the corpse.

"Mammy," says the child, "they've pulled granny's skin off
while you were away."

"What do you mean by telling such lies?"

"It's quite true, Mammy! There was ever such a blackie
came from under the stove, and he pulled the skin off, and got
into it himself."

"Hold your tongue, naughty child! you're talking nonsense!"
cried the old crone's daughter; then she fetched a big cauldron,
filled it with cold water, put it on the stove, and heated it till it
boiled furiously. Then the women lifted up the old crone, laid
her in a trough, took hold of the cauldron, and poured the whole
of the boiling water over her at once. The demon couldn't
stand it. He leaped out of the trough, dashed through the
doorway, and disappeared, skin and all. The women stared:

"What marvel is this?" they cried. "Here was the dead
woman, and now she isn't here. There's nobody left to lay out
or to bury. The demons have carried her off before our very
eyes!"[27]

A Russian peasant funeral is preceded or accompanied by a
considerable amount of wailing, which answers in some respect to the
Irish "keening." To the _zaplachki_,[28] or laments, which are uttered
on such occasions--frequently by hired wailers, who closely resemble
the Corsican "vociferators," the modern Greek "myrologists"--allusions
are sometimes made in the Skazkas. In the "Fox-wailer,"[29] for
example--one of the variants of the well-known "Jack and the
Beanstalk" story--an old man puts his wife in a bag and attempts to
carry her up the beanstalk to heaven. Becoming tired on the way, he
drops the bag, and the old woman is killed. After weeping over her
dead body he sets out in search of a Wailer. Meeting a bear, he cries,
"Wail a bit, Bear, for my old woman! I'll give you a pair of nice
white fowls." The bear growls out "Oh, dear granny of mine! how I
grieve for thee!" "No, no!" says the old man, "you can't wail." Going
a little further he tries a wolf, but the wolf succeeds no better than
the bear. At last a fox comes by, and on being appealed to, begins to
cry aloud "Turu-Turu, grandmother! grandfather has killed thee!"--a
wail which pleases the widower so much that he hands over the fowls to
the fox at once, and asks, enraptured, for "that strain again!"[30]

One of the most curious of the stories which relate to a village
burial,--one in which also the feeling with which the Russian
villagers so