"Hold your tongue, naughty child! you're talking nonsense!" cried the old crone's daughter; then she fetched a big cauldron, filled it with cold water, put it on the stove, and heated it till it boiled furiously. Then the women lifted up the old crone, laid her in a trough, took hold of the cauldron, and poured the whole of the boiling water over her at once. The demon couldn't stand it. He leaped out of the trough, dashed through the doorway, and disappeared, skin and all. The women stared: "What marvel is this?" they cried. "Here was the dead woman, and now she isn't here. There's nobody left to lay out or to bury. The demons have carried her off before our very eyes!"[27] A Russian peasant funeral is preceded or accompanied by a considerable amount of wailing, which answers in some respect to the Irish "keening." To the _zaplachki_,[28] or laments, which are uttered on such occasions--frequently by hired wailers, who closely resemble the Corsican "vociferators," the modern Greek "myrologists"--allusions are sometimes made in the Skazkas. In the "Fox-wailer,"[29] for example--one of the variants of the well-known "Jack and the Beanstalk" story--an old man puts his wife in a bag and attempts to carry her up the beanstalk to heaven. Becoming tired on the way, he drops the bag, and the old woman is killed. After weeping over her dead body he sets out in search of a Wailer. Meeting a bear, he cries, "Wail a bit, Bear, for my old woman! I'll give you a pair of nice white fowls." The bear growls out "Oh, dear granny of mine! how I grieve for thee!" "No, no!" says the old man, "you can't wail." Going a little further he tries a wolf, but the wolf succeeds no better than the bear. At last a fox comes by, and on being appealed to, begins to cry aloud "Turu-Turu, grandmother! grandfather has killed thee!"--a wail which pleases the widower so much that he hands over the fowls to the fox at once, and asks, enraptured, for "that strain again!"[30] One of the most curious of the stories which relate to a village burial,--one in which also the feeling with which the Russian villagers sometimes regard their clergy finds expression--is that called-- THE TREASURE.[31] In a certain kingdom there lived an old couple in great poverty. Sooner or later the old woman died. It was in winter, in severe and frosty weather. The old man went round to his friends and neighbors, begging them to help him to dig a grave for the old woman; but his friends and neighbors, knowing his great poverty, all flatly refused. The old man went to the pope,[32] (but in that village they had an awfully grasping pope, one without any conscience), and says he:-- "Lend a hand, reverend father, to get my old woman buried." "But have you got any money to pay for the funeral? if so, friend, pay up beforehand!"