ted him. He took off his copper cross, traced a
circle three times about the horse, and hung the cross round its
neck. And immediately the horse was no longer there, but in
its place there stood before Petrusha his own father. The son
looked upon the father, burst into tears, and led him to his cottage;
and for three days the old man remained without speaking,
unable to make use of his tongue. And after that they
lived happily and in all prosperity. The old man entirely gave
up drinking, and to his very last day never took so much as a
single drop of spirits.[46]

The Russian peasant is by no means deficient in humor, a fact of
which the Skazkas offer abundant evidence. But it is not easy to find
stories which can be quoted at full length as illustrations of that
humor. The jokes which form the themes of the Russian facetious tales
are for the most part common to all Europe. And a similar assertion
may be made with regard to the stories of most lands. An unfamiliar
joke is but rarely to be discovered in the lower strata of fiction. He
who has read the folk-tales of one country only, is apt to attribute
to its inhabitants a comic originality to which they can lay no claim.
And so a Russian who knows the stories of his own land, but has not
studied those of other countries, is very liable to credit the Skazkas
with the undivided possession of a number of "merry jests" in which
they can claim but a very small share--jests which in reality form the
stock-in-trade of rustic wags among the vineyards of France or
Germany, or on the hills of Greece, or beside the fiords of Norway, or
along the coasts of Brittany or Argyleshire--which for centuries have
set beards wagging in Cairo and Ispahan, and in the cool of the
evening hour have cheered the heart of the villager weary with his
day's toil under the burning sun of India.

It is only when the joke hinges upon something which is peculiar to a
people that it is likely to be found among that people only. But most
of the Russian jests turn upon pivots which are familiar to all the
world, and have for their themes such common-place topics as the
incorrigible folly of man, the inflexible obstinacy of woman. And in
their treatments of these subjects they offer very few novel features.
It is strange how far a story of this kind may travel, and yet how
little alteration it may undergo. Take, for instance, the skits
against women which are so universally popular. Far