race, but that its tales were direct descendants of the primitive nature-myths and that their variants retained, in the guise of wonder stories for the child, the persisting fragments of a great original epos which at one time pictured the heathen mythology of the old Slavonians: that the presumed purposeless nursery invention, in fact, deduced its high origin from the ancient gods themselves.
These older meanings, for the teller, vanished many centuries ago. The only things the skazki picture that are common to Russian country life to-day are those things which in Russia never change—the wide, wind-swept steppe and dense forest, the love of animal life and the comradeship of the horse, the dread and terror of the long winter cold, and the passionate welcome given to the springtime sun. Whatever else they may tell the student is in a tongue now unintelligible to the peasant, who has least of all been aware that, in these centuries-old repetitions there have been handed down to a new era pictures indelible, though blurred and indistinct, of an ancient age, of times, customs, religion and deities no longer his own.
For the beginning of the skazki we must go back to the remote time when the early Slavonians, parting from the parent stock in Central Asia, reached the Russias, de-
