Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 11, 1900.djvu/152

142 sea and knelt down and prayed to God; then he threw his hook into the sea and caught the Devil by the neck. Dragging him on to the land and beating him with a fiery sword, he said unto him, 'Give me back the children which thou hast stolen from my sister.' But the Devil replied, 'How can I return them after I have swallowed them?' And the saint replied, 'Thou must bring them up again.' The Devil said, 'Vomit thou first the milk which thou hast sucked from thy mother's breast.' And the saint prayed to God and he vomited the milk. The Devil, seeing this, got terribly frightened, and brought at once up all the six children hale and hearty, and not hurt in the least. But the saint said, 'I will not let thee free until thou swear no longer to harm man in future.' And the Devil swore by the Lord, who created heaven and earth, that wherever he would see the name or the book of the Holy Sisoe he would have no power to harm or to hurt the people. Saint Sisoe beat him fearfully and threw him into the sea; then taking the six children he brought them to his sister, and said unto her, 'Sister! here are the children which the Devil had swallowed.' She received them with great joy, rejoicing over and over again. And this is now the prayer: 'O Evil Spirit! mayest thou be killed and cursed by the terrible and glorious name of the Trinity, and by the 360 holy fathers of the Council of Nicaea. May X. remain clear and shining through the dew of the Holy Spirit as on the day in which his mother bore him; for ever and ever. Amen.

This is the Slavonic and Roumanian version of the complete legend of Sisin and the Evil Spirit, identified rather vaguely with the Devil. He merely steals the children without really hurting them. Slavonic and Roumanian texts, especially of a religious and legendary character, are as a rule based upon Greek texts, and similar Greek texts have really been found to exist. Leo Allatius has published in his De templis Græcorum, 1645, (pp. 126-129, 133-135; cf.