church-books, and
found that, three hundred years before, this occurrence had
taken place: a bridegroom had gone to the graveyard on his
wedding-day, and had disappeared. And his bride, after some
time had passed by, had married another man.

[The "Rip van Winkle" story is too well known to
require more than a passing allusion. It was doubtless
founded on one of the numerous folk-tales which
correspond to the Christian legend of "The Seven
Sleepers of Ephesus"--itself an echo of an older tale
(see Baring Gould, "Curious Myths," 1872, pp. 93-112,
and Cox, "Mythology of the Aryan Nations," i.
413)--and to that of the monk who listens to a bird
singing in the convent garden, and remains entranced
for the space of many years: of which latter legend a
Russian version occurs in Chudinsky's collection (No.
17, pp. 92-4). Very close indeed is the resemblance
between the Russian story of "The Two Friends," and
the Norse "Friends in Life and Death" (Asbjoernsen's
New Series, No. 62, pp. 5-7). In the latter the
bridegroom knocks hard and long on his dead friend's
grave. At length its occupant appears, and accounts
for his delay by saying he had been far away when the
first knocks came, and so had not heard them. Then he
follows the bridegroom to church and from church, and
afterwards the bridegroom sees him back to his tomb.
On the way the living man expresses a desire to see
something of the world beyond the grave, and the
corpse fulfils his wish, having first placed on his
head a sod cut in the graveyard. After witnessing many
strange sights, the bridegroom is told to sit down and
wait till his guide returns. When he rises to his
feet, he is all overgrown with mosses and shrub (var
han overvoxen med Mose og Busker), and when he reaches
the outer world he finds all things changed.]

But from these dim sketches of a life beyond, or rather within the
grave, in which memories of old days and old friendships are preserved
by ghosts of an almost genial and entirely harmless disposition, we
will now turn to those more elaborate pictures in which the dead are
represented under an altogether terrific aspect. It is not as an
incorporeal being that the visitor from the other world is represented
in the Skazkas. He comes not as a mere phantom, intang