one of rest. But the last day of the week among some Teutonic races has not been named after the Sabbath, but after a heathen deity. In Westphalia it is Saterdsas, Sâtersday in Anglo-Saxon, Saturdag in the Netherlands. Probably Saturn was taken as the equivalent of the Norse God Sutur, the black or seventh, not because evil, but as closing the age of the world. He seems to have left no traces in folk-lore, unless that he be identified with the Devil. But ‘Old Scratch’ is one of the names by which the Evil One was designated, and which exactly agreed with the popular imagination of the appearance of Satan when he chose to show himself. For Skrati was the hairy wood faun of our forefathers, and resembled the satyr of the Romans, horned, and with legs like a goat’s, and the lower portion of the body covered with hair. The name is found not only in English, Anglo-Saxon, Old German, and Norse, but also among the Sclavonic peoples, the Bohemians, the Poles, and the Slavonians. Grimm could find no root for the name in the German vocabulary; but in Slavonic, skrŷto signifies to hide or keep in concealment, and this would well explain the characteristic of the satyr hiding in the woods and but rarely seen.
