In order that the reader may get a clear idea of the scope and general character of Caucasian proverbial literature, I will give without further comment a few selections from the current sayings of the Laks, the Chechenses, the Abkhazians, the Koorintzes and the Avars: "Don't spit into a well: you may have to drink out of it;" "A fish would talk if his mouth were not full of water;" "Bread doesn't run after the belly, but the belly after bread;" "A rich man wherever he goes finds a feast--a poor fellow, although he goes to a feast, finds trouble;" "Stick to the old road and your father's friends;" "Your body is pledged to pay for your sins;" "Burial is the only medicine for the dead;" "Swift water never gets to the sea;" "With good neighbors you can marry off even your blind daughter;" "You can't get sugar out of every stone;" "Out of a hawk's nest comes a hawk;" "A fat ox and a rotten shroud are good for nothing;" "There are seven tastes as to a man's dress, but only one as to his stature" (_i.e.,_ his own); "A good head will find itself a hat;" "At the attack of the wolf the ass shuts his eyes;" "If you are sweet to others, they will swallow you--if bitter, they will spit you out;" "Go where you will, lift up any stone and you will find a Lak under it;" "He is like a hen that wants to lay an egg, and can't;" "He who is sated cannot understand the hungry;" "A barking dog soon grows old;" "A quiet cat eats a big lump of fat;" "If water bars your road, be a fish--if cliffs, a mountain-goat." Closely allied to Caucasian proverbs in spirit and in rough, grotesque humor are Caucasian anecdotes, of which I have space for only a few characteristic specimens. They are almost invariably short, terse and pithy, and would prove, even in the absence of all other evidence, that these fierce, stern, unyielding mountaineers have the keenest possible appreciation of humor, and that in the quick perception and hearty enjoyment of pure absurdity they come nearer to Americans than do perhaps any of the West European races. One of the following anecdotes, "The Big Turnip," I have seen in American newspapers within a year, and all of them bear a greater or less resemblance, both in spirit and form, to American stories. I will begin with an anecdote of the mullah Nazr-Eddin, a mythical, or at any rate an historically unknown, individual, whose personality the mountaineers use as a sort of peg upon which to hang all the floating jokes and absurd stories which they from time to time hear or invent, just as Americans use the traditional Irishman to give a modern stamp to a joke which perhaps is as old as the Pyramids. The mountaineers originally borrowed this lay figure of Nazr-Eddin from the Turks, but they have clothed it in an entirely new suit of blunders, witticisms and absurdities of their own manufacture.