When the woman awoke, she began squalling, at the top of her voice, about her eyes, but could not tell what was the matter with them. The other women, who had been much frightened, began to cry out: “Oh, you wretch, you! you’ve brought a terrible punishment on yourself from Mother Friday.” Then they told her all that had taken place. She listened to it all, and then began imploring: “Mother Friday, forgive me! Pardon me, the guilty one! I’ll offer thee a taper, and I’ll never let friend or foe dishonor thee, mother!” “Well, what do you think? During the night, back came Mother Friday, and took the dust out of that woman’s eyes, so that she was able to get about again. It’s a great sin to dishonor Mother Friday, combing and spinning flax, forsooth!”[455] Professor Max Müller, in his “Contributions to the Science of Mythology” (New York and Bombay, 1897), cites a tradition of the as yet little known mythology of the Mordvinians, a Finnish race inhabiting the middle Volga provinces of Russia. A woman who had been working all day long on a Friday, baking bread for some orphan children, was taken up in a dream to the sun, and when she was nearly exhausted, owing to the effects of the heat, and to the rapidly increasing size of a piece of dough which she had put into her mouth, she was accosted by Chkaï, the large-eyed Mordvine sun-god, who told her that she was being punished because she had baked bread for the orphans on a Friday. She was charged, moreover, to tell all the people so. “But who will be such a fool as to believe me?” asked the woman most disrespectfully. Thereupon Chkaï placed his mark in scarlet and blue upon her forehead,—an emblem which is thought to bring luck. And after that the Mordvine women were careful to bake no bread, nor to do any other work, on a Friday. It was a very early custom in England to appoint Friday as the day for the execution of criminals, and until recently the same was true in this country, but through the persistent efforts of the “Thirteen Club,” of New York, whose object is the discouragement of certain popular superstitions, the sixth day of the week has been partially relieved of the odium of being “hangman’s day” in the United States. A writer of an inventive turn of mind has suggested that Friday’s unpopularity is partly owing to its being late in the week and money runs short to the poor. Saturday being the close of the week, and pay-day as well, there is no time then to be superstitious.