And what an ancient old-world tale Picus could tell. For, in the long ago, was he not Picus the antique Italiot god. A forest-god he was, son of ancient Saturn, and himself the father of that beautiful being of the woods, Faunus. And how far he wandered from Thracian valley and Sabine oak-grove ... for in that far northern Finland, which to the Latins was but an unknown remote waste under the star Septentrion, he and his son reappear, though now his name is Tapio and Faunus is become Nyyrikki.... “O Nyyrikki, mountain-hero, Son of Tapio of forests, Hero with the scarlet headgear, Notches make along the pathway, Landmarks upward on the mountain, That the hunter may not wander.” Still does Nyyrikki, or Pikker as he was called by the northmen long before the _Kalevala_ was wrought into Finnish runes, make notches along the pathways of the woods, still the huntsman on the hillside sees his signals on the oak-boles. Perhaps to this day the Esthonian peasant offers in his heart a prayer to Pikker the woodpecker-god, god of thunder and storm, so god too of the glades and fields where these can devastate--a prayer such as that which Johann Gutsloff, a Finnish author of the seventeenth century, cites as the supplication of an old Esthonian farmer: ‘... Beloved Pikker, we will sacrifice to thee an ox with two horns and four hoofs, and want to beg you as to our ploughing and sowing that our straw shall be red as copper and our grain as yellow as gold. Send elsewhere all thick black clouds over great swamps, high woods, and wide wastes. But give to us ploughmen and sowers a fertile season and sweet rain.’