r, and
the kitchen-maid his godmother. After that they both lived
long and happily, survived to a great age, and then died peacefully.[37]

There is one marked feature in the Russian peasant's character to
which the Skazkas frequently refer--his passion for drink. To him
strong liquor is a friend, a comforter, a solace amid the ills of
life. Intoxication is not so much an evil to be dreaded or remembered
with shame, as a joy to be fondly anticipated, or classed with the
happy memories of the past. By him drunkenness is regarded, like
sleep, as the friend of woe--and a friend whose services can be even
more readily commanded. On certain occasions he almost believes that
to get drunk is a duty he owes either to the Church, or to the memory
of the Dead; at times without the slightest apparent cause, he is
seized by a sudden and irresistible craving for ardent spirits, and he
commences a drinking-bout which lasts--with intervals of coma--for
days, or even weeks, after which he resumes his everyday life and his
usual sobriety as calmly as if no interruption had taken place. All
these ideas and habits of his find expression in his popular tales,
giving rise to incidents which are often singularly out of keeping
with the rest of the narrative in which they occur. In one of the many
variants,[38] for instance, of a widespread and well known story--that
of the three princesses who are rescued from captivity by a hero from
whom they are afterwards carried away, and who refuse to get married
until certain clothes or shoes or other things impossible for ordinary
workmen to make are supplied to them--an unfortunate shoemaker is told
that if he does not next day produce the necessary shoes (of perfect
fit, although no measure has been taken, and all set thick with
precious stones) he shall be hanged. Away he goes at once to a
_traktir_, or tavern, and sets to work to drown his grief in drink.
After awhile he begins to totter. "Now then," he says, "I'll take home
a bicker of spirits with me, and go to bed. And to-morrow morning, as
soon as they come to fetch me to be hanged, I'll toss off half the
bickerful. They may hang me then without my knowing anything about
it."[39]

In the story of the "Purchased Wife," the Princess Anastasia, the
Beautiful, enables the youth Ivan, who ransoms her, to win a large sum
of money in the following manner. Having worked a piece of embroidery,
she tells him to take it to market. "But if any one