The pagan fear of water sprites still exists in Sweden. On crossing any water after dark it is thought advisable to _spit three times_, as a safeguard against their evil influences.[98] It is also thought to be dangerous to draw water from a well without saluting the divinity which governs it. This custom remains among modern Greeks. A thief is supposed to be safe in his evil course if he sacrifices to the water sprites, by throwing a little of that which he has stolen into a stream. In Esthonia, the newly married wife drops a present into the well of the house where she is to reside. In 1641, Hans Ohm, of Sommerpahl in Esthonia, built a mill upon a sacred stream. Bad harvests followed for several years until the peasants fell upon the mill, burnt it down and destroyed the piles in the water. Ohm went to law and obtained a verdict against the peasants. But to rid himself of new and grievous persecutions, he induced pastor Gutslaff to write a treatise especially combating this superstition. The Esthonians replied, when asked how good or bad weather could depend upon springs and brooks: “It is our ancient faith: the men of old have so taught us. Mills have been burnt down on this brook before now.” They called it “Holy Brook,” and believed that when they wanted rain it could be produced by throwing something into the stream.[99] Many similar stories abound in the modern literature of Esthonia. Although less refined, the water-worship mythology of Northern Europe was as widespread and persistent in its influence as that of Southern Europe or of Asia. Its influence upon Christianity was not less strongly marked, and the modifications which it produced in Christian baptism continue in a great degree to the present day. The universal sway of pagan baptism and its essential unity are shown by turning from Northern Europe to the extreme point of another continent and considering Water-Worship in Mexico. PRESCOTT speaks of the amazement with which the early Spaniards beheld the points of similarity between the customs of the pagan Mexicans and the Roman Catholic Church; he says: “With the same feelings they witnessed another ceremony, that of the Aztec baptism; in which, after a solemn invocation, the head and lips of the infant were touched with water, and a name given to it; while the goddess Cioacoatl, who presided over childbirth, was implored that the sin which was given to us before the beginning of the world might not visit the child, but that, cleansed by these waters, it might live and be born anew.”[100] A full account of this pagan baptism in Mexico is given by SAHAGUN-DE-BERNARDINO, as follows: