"Ah, Prince Ivan! why, we never expected to see you again. Well, it wasn't for nothing that you gave yourself so much trouble. Such a beauty as Marya Morevna one might search for all the world over--and never find one like her!" And so they visited, and they feasted; and afterwards they went off to their own realm.[104] With the Baba Yaga, the feminine counterpart of Koshchei and the Snake, we shall deal presently, and the Waters of Life and Death will find special notice elsewhere.[105] A magic water, which brings back the dead to life, plays a prominent part in the folk-lore of all lands, but the two waters, each performing one part only of the cure, render very noteworthy the Slavonic stories in which they occur. The Princess, Marya Morevna, who slaughters whole armies before she is married, and then becomes mild and gentle, belongs to a class of heroines who frequently occur both in the stories and in the "metrical romances," and to whom may be applied the remarks made by Kemble with reference to a similar Amazon.[106] In one of the variants of the story the representative of Marya Morevna fights the hero before she marries him.[107] The Bluebeard incident of the forbidden closet is one which often occurs in the Skazkas, as we shall see further on; and the same may be said about the gratitude of the Bird, Bee, and Lioness. The story of Immortal Koshchei is one of very frequent occurrence, the different versions maintaining a unity of idea, but varying considerably in detail. In one of them,[108] in which Koshchei's part is played by a Snake, the hero's sisters are carried off by their feathered admirers without his leave being asked--an omission for which a full apology is afterwards made; in another, the history of "Fedor Tugarin and Anastasia the Fair,"[109] the hero's three sisters are wooed and won, not by the Falcon, the Eagle, and the Raven, but by the Wind, the Hail, and the Thunder. He himself marries the terrible heroine Anastasia the Fair, in the forbidden chamber of whose palace he finds a snake "hung up by one of its ribs." He gives it a lift and it gets free from its hook and flies away, carrying off Anastasia the Fair. Fedor eventually finds her, escapes with her on a magic foal which he obtains, thanks to the aid of grateful wolves, bees, and crayfish, and destroys the snake by striking it "on the forehead" with the stone which was destined to be its death. In a third version of the story,[110] the hero finds in the forbidden chamber "Koshchei the Deathless, in a cauldron amid flames, boiling in pitch." There he has been, he declares, for fifteen years, having been lured there by the beauty of Anastasia the Fair. In a fourth,[111] in which the hero's three sisters marry three beggars, who turn out to be snakes with twenty, thirty, and forty heads apiece, Koshchei is found in the forbidden chamber, seated on a horse which is chained to a cauldron.