[The "Rip van Winkle" story is too well known to require more than a passing allusion. It was doubtless founded on one of the numerous folk-tales which correspond to the Christian legend of "The Seven Sleepers of Ephesus"--itself an echo of an older tale (see Baring Gould, "Curious Myths," 1872, pp. 93-112, and Cox, "Mythology of the Aryan Nations," i. 413)--and to that of the monk who listens to a bird singing in the convent garden, and remains entranced for the space of many years: of which latter legend a Russian version occurs in Chudinsky's collection (No. 17, pp. 92-4). Very close indeed is the resemblance between the Russian story of "The Two Friends," and the Norse "Friends in Life and Death" (Asbjörnsen's New Series, No. 62, pp. 5-7). In the latter the bridegroom knocks hard and long on his dead friend's grave. At length its occupant appears, and accounts for his delay by saying he had been far away when the first knocks came, and so had not heard them. Then he follows the bridegroom to church and from church, and afterwards the bridegroom sees him back to his tomb. On the way the living man expresses a desire to see something of the world beyond the grave, and the corpse fulfils his wish, having first placed on his head a sod cut in the graveyard. After witnessing many strange sights, the bridegroom is told to sit down and wait till his guide returns. When he rises to his feet, he is all overgrown with mosses and shrub (var han overvoxen med Mose og Busker), and when he reaches the outer world he finds all things changed.] But from these dim sketches of a life beyond, or rather within the grave, in which memories of old days and old friendships are preserved by ghosts of an almost genial and entirely harmless disposition, we will now turn to those more elaborate pictures in which the dead are represented under an altogether terrific aspect. It is not as an incorporeal being that the visitor from the other world is represented in the Skazkas. He comes not as a mere phantom, intangible, impalpable, incapable of physical exertion, haunting the dwelling which once was his home, or the spot to which he is drawn by the memory of some unexpiated crime. It is as a vitalized corpse that he comes to trouble mankind, often subject to human appetites, constantly endowed with more than human strength and malignity. His apparel is generally that of the grave, and he cannot endure to part with it, as may be seen from the following story-- THE SHROUD.[404]