e will be found resting with rosy cheek
and gory mouth.

The Kashoubes say that when a _Vieszcy_, as they call the Vampire,
wakes from his sleep within the grave, he begins to gnaw his hands and
feet; and as he gnaws, one after another, first his relations, then
his other neighbors, sicken and die. When he has finished his own
store of flesh, he rises at midnight and destroys cattle, or climbs a
belfry and sounds the bell. All who hear the ill-omened tones will
soon die. But generally he sucks the blood of sleepers. Those on whom
he has operated will be found next morning dead, with a very small
wound on the left side of the breast, exactly over the heart. The
Lusatian Wends hold that when a corpse chews its shroud or sucks its
own breast, all its kin will soon follow it to the grave. The
Wallachians say that a _murony_--a sort of cross between a werwolf and
a vampire, connected by name with our nightmare--can take the form of
a dog, a cat, or a toad, and also of any blood-sucking insect. When he
is exhumed, he is found to have long nails of recent growth on his
hands and feet, and blood is streaming from his eyes, ears, nose and
mouth.

The Russian stories give a very clear account of the operation
performed by the vampire on his victims. Thus, one night, a peasant is
conducted by a stranger into a house where lie two sleepers, an old
man and a youth. "The stranger takes a pail, places it near the youth,
and strikes him on the back; immediately the back opens, and forth
flows rosy blood. The stranger fills the pail full, and drinks it dry.
Then he fills another pail with blood from the old man, slakes his
brutal thirst, and says to the peasant, 'It begins to grow light! let
us go back to my dwelling.'"[419]

Many skazkas also contain, as we have already seen, very clear
directions how to deprive a vampire of his baleful power. According to
them, as well as to their parallels elsewhere, a stake must be driven
through the murderous corpse. In Russia an aspen stake is selected for
that purpose, but in some places one made of thorn is preferred. But a
Bohemian vampire, when staked in this manner in the year 1337, says
Mannhardt,[420] merely exclaimed that the stick would be very useful
for keeping off dogs; and a _strigon_ (or Istrian vampire) who was
transfixed with a sharp thorn cudgel near Laibach, in 1672, pulled it
out of his body and flung it back contemptuously. The only certain
methods of destroying a vampire a