The only bit of art or pastime to be found among the peasants seems to consist in the "circling dances" with songs, at harvest, Christmas, and all other important festivals, as described by Mr. Ralston. And even here "the settled gloom, the monotonous sadness," are most remarkable. Wife-beating, husbands' infidelities, horrible stories of witches and vampires, are the general subjects of the songs. The lament of the young bride who is treated almost like a slave by her father and mother-in-law, has a chorus: "Thumping, scolding, never lets his daughter sleep"; "Up, you slattern! up, you sloven, sluggish slut!" A wife entreats: "Oh, my husband, only for good cause beat thou thy wife, not for little things. Far away is my father dear, and farther still my mother." The husband who is tired of his wife sings: "Thanks, thanks to the blue pitcher (_i. e._, poison), it has rid me of my cares; not that cares afflicted me, my real affliction was my wife," ending, "Love will I make to the girls across the stream." Next comes a wife who poisons her husband: "I dried the evil root, and pounded it small;" but in this case the husband was hated because he had killed her brother. The most unpleasant of all, however, are the invocations to _vodki_. A circle of girls imitate drunken women, and sing as they dance: "_Vodki_ delicious I drank, I drank; not in a cup or a glass, but a bucketful I drank.... I cling to the posts of the door. Oh, doorpost, hold me up, the drunken woman, the tipsy rogue." The account of the Baba Zaga, a hideous old witch, is enough to drive children into convulsions. She has a nose and teeth made of strong sharp iron. As she lies in her hut she stretches from one corner to the other, and her nose goes through the roof. The fence is made of the bones of the people she has eaten, and tipped with their skulls. The uprights of the gate are human legs. She has a broom to sweep away the traces of her passage over the snow in her seven-leagued boots. She steals children to eat them.