The wood-demon of the Russians, Ljeschi, calls to mind both classical and modern traditions. He is of human form, with the horns, ears, and feet of a goat, his fingers are long claws, and he is covered with rough hair, often of a green colour. He can assume many forms, and vary his stature at will; in the fields he is no higher than the grass, in the woods as tall as the trees. Sometimes he is like a man, clothed in sheepskins, and often, like the cyclops, with only one eye. Like other wood-demons, he announces his presence in the storm and the wind. He springs from tree to tree, and rocks himself in the branches, screeching and laughing, neighing, lowing, and barking. He delights to mislead the traveller and plunge him in difficulties. However unfriendly to man, Ljeschi is on good terms with animals; all the birds and beasts of the wood are under his protection, and the migrations of squirrels, field-mice, and such small deer are carried out under his guidance. The peasants are at pains to propitiate him. In the province of Olonitz the shepherds offer him a cow every summer, to secure his favour for the herd; elsewhere the hunter gives him the first thing he shoots, leaving it for him in an oak-wood, or places a piece of bread or pancake strewed with salt upon a tree stump. There are certain ways of conjuring his presence and his aid by means of birch-twigs, or by uttering a given formula while standing on a tree-stump, from which it would appear that he is thought of as dwelling in these vegetable fragments.[149] The Russians also believe in female wood-spirits of terrifying appearance, but they are of less importance than the male. In the folk-lore of the Finns the spirits of the woods bear a more benign character. The chief of them, “Tapio,” is termed “the gracious god of the woodlands,” and is represented as very tall and slender, with a long brown beard, a coat of tree moss, and a high-crowned hat of fir leaves. His consort is Mielikki, “the honey rich mother of the woodland,” “the hostess of glen and forest.” The neighbouring Esthonians have their “grass-mother” who, besides presiding over the home-field, is also queen of the woods. It is not perhaps singular to find that the traditions with regard to wood-spirits current amongst contiguous peoples should exhibit such a strong resemblance to each other, but when almost exactly the same conceptions are met with in such distant parts as Japan and South America, we can only conclude that the human mind, wherever it exists, is similarly constituted, and, granted the same phenomena, falls back upon the same ideas to explain them.