“Buy two tapers, a big one and a little one, and do thus and thus with them.”
Well, next day the Prophet Elijah and St. Nicholas were walking along together in the guise of wayfarers, and they met the Moujik, who was carrying two wax tapers—one, a big rouble one, and the other, a tiny copeck one.
“Where are you going, Moujik?” asked St. Nicholas.
“Well, I’m going to offer a rouble taper to Prophet Elijah; he’s been ever so good to me! When my crops were ruined by the hail, he bestirred himself like anything, and gave me a plentiful harvest, twice as good as the other would have been.”
“And the copeck taper, what’s that for?”
“Why, that’s for Nicholas!” said the peasant and passed on.
“There now, Elijah!” says Nicholas, “you say I go and tell everything to the Moujik—surely you can see for yourself how much truth there is in that!”
Thereupon the matter ended. Elijah was appeased and didn’t threaten to hurt the Moujik any more. And the Moujik led a prosperous life, and from that time forward he held in equal honor Elijah’s Day and Nicholas’s Day.
It is not always to the Prophet Ilya that the power once attributed to Perun is now ascribed. The pagan wielder of the thunderbolt is represented in modern traditions by more than one Christian saint. Sometimes, as St. George, he transfixes monsters with his lance; sometimes, as St. Andrew, he smites with his mace a spot given over to witchcraft. There was a village (says one of the legends of the Chernigof Government) in which lived more than a thousand witches, and they used to steal the holy stars, until at last “there was not one left to light our sinful world.” Then God sent the holy Andrew, who struck with his mace—and all that village was swallowed up by the earth, and the place thereof became a swamp.[447]
About St. George many stories are told, and still more ballads (if we may be allowed to call them so) are sung. Under the names of Georgy, Yury, and Yegory the Brave, he is celebrated as a patron as well of wolves as of flocks and herds, as a Christian Confessor struggling and suffering for the faith amid pagan foes, and as a chivalrous destroyer of snakes and dragons. The discrepancies which exist between the various representations given of his character and his functions are very glaring, but they may be explained by the fact that a number of legendary ideas sprung from separate sources have become associated with his name; so that in one story his actions are in keeping with the character of an old Slavonian deity, in another, with that of a Christian or a Buddhist saint.