"Listen, O Dog! thou wert a Dog (_Sobaka_), a clean beast; through all Paradise the most holy didst thou roam. Henceforward shalt thou be a Hound (_Pes_, or _Pyos_), an unclean beast. Into a dwelling it shall be a sin to admit thee; into a church if thou dost run, the church must be consecrated anew." And so--the story concludes--"ever since that time it has been called not a dog but a hound--skin-deep it is unclean (_pogana_), but clean within." According to another story, when men first inhabited the earth, they did not know how to build houses, so as to keep themselves warm in winter. But instead of asking aid from the Lord, they applied to the Devil, who taught them how to make an _izba_ or ordinary Russian cottage. Following his instructions, they made wooden houses, each of which had a door but no window. Inside these huts it was warm; but there was no living in them, on account of the darkness. "So the people went back to the Evil One. The Evil one strove and strove, but nothing came of it, the izba still remained pitch dark. Then the people prayed unto the Lord. And the Lord said: 'Hew out a window!' So they hewed out windows, and it became light."[425] Some of the Russian traditions about the creation of man are closely connected with Teutonic myths. The Schismatics called _Dukhobortsui_, or Spirit-Wrestlers, for instance, hold that man was composed of earthly materials, but that God breathed into his body the breath of life. "His flesh was made of earth, his bones of stone, his veins of roots, his blood of water, his hair of grass, his thought of the wind, his spirit of the cloud."[426] Many of the Russian stories about the early ages of the world, also, are current in Western Europe, such as that about the rye--which in olden days was a mass of ears from top to bottom. But some lazy harvest-women having cursed "God's corn," the Lord waxed wroth and began to strip the ears from the stem. But when the last ear was about to fall, the Lord had pity upon the penitent culprits, and allowed the single ear to remain as we now see it.[427] A Little-Russian variant of this story says that Ilya (Elijah), was so angry at seeing the base uses to which a woman turned "God's corn," that he began to destroy all the corn in the world. But a dog begged for, and received a few ears. From these, after Ilya's wrath was spent, mankind obtained seed, and corn began to grow again on the face of the earth, but not in its pristine bulk and beauty. It is on account of the good service thus rendered to our race that we ought to cherish and feed the dog.[428]