storehouse," the grasshopper said, "for Jupiter is about to send a
thunderbolt down to the earth."
That was exactly what happened. Melampos had just time to reach his
grain field and order his men to put the ripe sheaves safely under cover
when the sky grew black and the thunder rolled along the mountain tops.
A high wind blew and the rain was heavy, but Melampos had saved his
harvest.
All outdoors talked to Melampos after that, and it was very pleasant
indeed, for he had no boys and girls of his own to keep him company. If
he sat down to rest on a bank of moss in the forest, he was at once
surrounded by friends. A little wild bee would light on a branch in
front of him and tell him where he might find its sweet comb dripping
with honey nearby. A butterfly would poise on his rough, soil stained
hand and tell him where he would be able to see a bed of yellow
daffodils beside a brook. Or a bird in a nearby bush would sing to him
of the gay doings of Pan and the dryads and tell him the road to take to
their haunts farther and deeper in the woods.
Melampos had never had such a good time in his life. He was an excellent
husbandman and managed to make his farm pay well every year, but he
cared very much more for this friendship of outdoors than he did for the
hoards of food each harvest gave him. And, more and more, he came to
stay in the woods and fields, holding conversation with the insects and
the wild animals.
One harvest season Melampos was returning from the market with a large
purse of gold pieces that had just been paid him for the sale of his
summer wheat. He was taking his way through a deserted path of the
forest where he hoped he might hear the echo, at least, of the merry
pipes of Pan. He had not a thought or care in the world when, in an
instant, he was laid low on the ground from a blow on his head, his gold
was snatched away from him, and he was bound so tightly that he could
not move. Melampos had been set upon by a band of robbers who threw him
over the back of a horse and made off with him into the recesses of the
forest.
It was not that peaceful, sylvan grove of the forest that Pan and his
friends inhabited, but a dark, gloomy part where it was so still that
even the sound of a twig falling to the ground seemed as loud as the
splintering of an arrow, and no one ever passed by. The robbers put
Melampos in an underground passage of a prison-like fortress which they
had built for themselves. From beam to floor the fortress was built all
of oak planks so old and thick and so completely covered with ivy on the
outside that it looked like part of the forest itself.
Melampos had only a slit in the wall for a window, and he never saw his
captors save when they tossed him some dried crusts once a day. He could
hear them, though, counting their stolen coin and rattling it about.
Then he heard the sound of clinking armor and the occasional clashing of
swords.
"They are planning to kill me," he thought.
He looked longingly at the narrow chink in his prison wall, hardly large
enough to let a sunbeam through.
"If I could but beckon to a wood pigeon and tell it my plight, I should
be able to send a message to my friends by it," he sighed, "or I could
ask the woodpecker who can bore through wood to try and widen my window
so that I might escape."
Just then Melampos heard a rustling sound in the heavy beam of the
ceiling of the room where he was imprisoned and then a small voice spoke
to him.
"We could teach you better than any other creatures how to escape," it
said. "For years this forest has belonged to us, small as we are, and in
a very short time now it will return to the earth from which the trees
that built it came."
Melampos was amazed. He looked in all the corners of the room but could
see no one. Then the voice went on.
"No wood, or men who live in shelters made of wood are safe from us. We
have bored the beams and timbers of this fortress in a thousand places
until they are hollow and ready to fall."
Suddenly Melampos discovered the source of the voice. Through a knothole
in a beam above his head a wood worm peered down at him. With its
companions it had eaten the planks that made the fortress until it was
no safer than a house of paper.
"We are all doomed," Melampos told one of the robbers who brought him
his food that night.
"Doomed; what do you mean by that?" the robber asked in terror, for like
most of his kind he was nothing but a coward at heart.
Melampos showed him the decayed wood, hollow, and riddled with holes,
and the man called his companions to see their danger. They decided that
they must flee from the fortress at once, and they decided to give
Melampos his freedom. It would not have been safe to stay in the
fortress another season, for almost as soon as the winter storms came it
crumbled like a house of sand, and the ants and the crickets used it to
make themselves winter shelters.
Melampos went back to his farm and the pleasant conversation of the
insects, the birds, and his four-footed friends. He was the first mortal
to have such friends, but there were others who followed him and found
happiness, also, through being kind to little wild creatures.
HOW A HUNTRESS BECAME A BEAR.
Although Juno was the queen of the gods she had a failing that is common
to mortals. She was very jealous, and particularly of any maiden of
Earth whom she fancied might sometime be given a place by Jupiter among
the great family of the gods on Mount Olympus. As soon as Juno saw
Callisto, a beautiful huntress of the forests of Arcadia, she disliked
her.
Perhaps Juno would have liked to be free to roam through the woods where
Pan played his music for dancing and the Dryads sported from one season
to another as Callisto did. The goddess may have envied the huntress her
happy, free life with no royal duties to interfere with her daily chase
of the deer or any heavy crown to keep the breezes from tossing her long
dark hair. Callisto reverenced Jupiter and Juno alike, with no thought
that she might be arousing the displeasure of the goddess, but one day a
strange and fearful thing happened to her.
She had just raised her bow to her shoulder ready to shoot an arrow as
straight as a dart through the green path of the forest when it suddenly
struck her hand and she fell to the moss upon her hands and knees. She
tried to reach out her arms in supplication but they had become thick
and heavy and were covered with long black hair. Her hands grew rounded,
were armed with crooked claws and served her for feet. Her voice, which
had been so sweet that it charmed the birds when she called to them,
changed to a terrifying growl.
Callisto raised herself as well as she could, lifting up her paws to beg
mercy of the gods and uttering frightful roars as she bemoaned her fate.
She had always been obliged to defend herself from the lions and wolves
that haunted the forest and she felt that she would be at their mercy
now. All at once, though, she understood what had happened to her. She,
herself, was now no longer a mortal but a wild beast. Juno had persuaded
Jupiter to change Callisto to the first bear.
She had never liked to be out in the wood at night, but now she had no
shelter and had to roam through the darkness, pursued often by the same
wild beasts whom it had been her custom to hunt before. She fled from
her own dogs in terror and was in hourly terror of the same arrows which
she had formerly aimed so straight. In the winter Callisto crawled into
some hollow log or dug a cave for herself that she might keep alive
during the season of the North Wind's reign, and when spring came she
crawled out, lean and weak, to search for the wild bee's comb and the
first juicy berries of the juniper.
One day a boy saw the bear as he was out hunting. Callisto saw him at
the same time and realized that he was her own son, Arcas, now grown to
be a tall youth and taking his part in the chase as his mother had so
many seasons before. Callisto forgot her changed form in her great joy
at seeing her son, and she arose to her hind feet and hastened toward
him holding out her paws to embrace him. The boy, alarmed, raised his
hunting spear and ran to meet the bear and thrust its point through her
heart. Callisto's son would have killed her if Jupiter had not, just
then, looked down on the forest from his throne and felt a sudden pity
for the tragedy he had brought about.
The gods had made a long road in the sky that led to the palace of the
Sun. Any one may see this road on a clear night, for it stretches across
the face of the sky and is known as the Milky Way. The palaces of the
illustrious gods stood on either side of the road and a little farther
back were placed the homes of the lesser deities.
At the very moment that Arcas, his spear raised, rushed upon Callisto,
two new comers appeared in the sky near the road of the gods. They had
the form of a Great Bear and a Little Bear, but their bodies were made
of brightly shining stars. The mighty Jupiter had transformed Callisto
and her son into these two constellations.
How enraged Juno was when she found it out! She descended to the sea and
told her troubles to Oceanus, a giant of the race of Titans who ruled
the waters at that time.
"Do you wonder, Oceanus," Juno cried, "why I, the queen of the gods,
have left the heavenly plains and seek your depths? It is because my
authority has been set aside. I shall be supplanted among my fellow
gods, for Callisto, the bear, has been taken up to the skies and given a
place among the stars. Who can deny but that she may not occupy my
throne next!"
"What would you have me do about it?" old Oceanus asked, a little
puzzled as to why Juno had consulted him.
"I forbade Callisto to keep her human form and my will has been unjustly
set aside," Juno replied. "Now that she has an abode on the road to
heaven she will be able to take any form she desires and may come to you
for help in her attempt to steal my throne. I command you to never allow
the stars of her constellation to touch the waters."
Oceanus called a council of the other powers of the waters and they
assented to Juno's decree. One after another the stars rose and set,
touching the sea in their courses, but the Great Bear and the Little
Bear moved ceaselessly round and round in the sky, never sinking to rest
as the other stars did beneath the ocean. Juno had thought that this
would be a punishment for them but as it turned out it was a kind of
reward.
Because the Great Bear and the Little Bear were always to be seen in
their changeless, shining course, people who were obliged to travel at
night, and particularly those who were at sea, grew to depend upon them
as a means of finding their way in the darkness. The last star in the
tail of the Little Bear indicated the north and was known after a while
as the Pole Star. The ancients called it also the Star of Arcadia, for
it helped so many mariners to find their way home across the perilous
waters.
It had happened to Juno, as it often happens to jealous people to-day,
that she had not hurt Callisto in the least but had brought her a great
deal of honor.
THE ADVENTURE OF GLAUCUS.
Glaucus, the fisherman, rubbed his eyes to find out if he was not
dreaming. He had just drawn in his net to land and had emptied it, ready
to sort the fish that lay, a large haul, all over the grass. But a
strange thing was happening to them. Of a sudden, the fishes began to
revive and move their fins exactly as if they were in the water. Then,
as Glaucus looked at them in astonishment, the fishes one and all moved
off to the water, plunged in, and swam away.
The spot where Glaucus fished was a beautiful island in the river, but a
solitary place, for it was inhabited only by him. It was not used to
pasture cattle even, or visited by anyone. No one was there to work
sorcery with his haul. Glaucus did not know what to make of the
happening.
"Can it be that the river-god is working this marvel?" he wondered to
himself. Then it occurred to him that there might be some secret power
in the thick green leaves that covered the island among the grasses.
"What may not be the power of this herb?" he asked himself, pulling up a
handful of the leaves and tasting one.
Scarcely had the juices of the plant touched Glaucus' tongue than a
strange feeling of restlessness filled him, and he was overcome by an
unconquerable thirst. He could not keep away from the water but ran to
the edge of the river where he had fished for so many years, plunged in
and swam away toward the sea.
It was a wonderful, free kind of experience for Glaucus who had never
known any life but that of hauling in his nets and then casting them
again. As he followed the swiftly flowing currents, the waters of a
hundred rivers flowed over him, washing away all that was mortal of the
fisherman, and he came at last to the sea. A marvellous sight met him
there. The surf that beat against a rocky shore became suddenly smooth,
as a chariot drawn by horses shod with brass and having long floating
manes of gold rolled toward Glaucus over the surface of the sea. A giant
who held a three-pointed spear for crushing rocks and blew loud trumpet
blasts from a great curved shell, drove the chariot toward Glaucus and
then stopped, inviting him to ride down to the depths of the ocean.
It was Neptune, the god of the sea, and Glaucus discovered that he felt
quite at home in the chariot. He was no longer a dweller of the earth,
but had become a citizen of that boundless country that lay beneath the
waves. The fisherman was completely changed in form. His hair was sea
green and trailed behind him through the water. His shoulders broadened,
and his limbs took the shape and use of a fish's tail. He had never
known such freedom and joy as now when he spent whole days doing nothing
but following the ebb and flow of the tides and learning the use of his
newly found fins as a bird tries its wings on first leaving the nest.
But Glaucus still retained powers of thinking and of action which are
denied the inhabitants of the sea. One day he saw the beautiful maiden,
Scylla, one of the water nymphs, come out from a sheltered nook on the
shore and seat herself on a rock, dipping her hands in the water and
bringing up sea-shells for twining in the water weeds to make a
necklace. Glaucus had never seen so fair a creature as Scylla and he
moved toward her through the waves, rising at last and stopping at the
place where she sat as he murmured his affection for her above the
singing of the sea.
But Scylla was very much terrified at the sight of this strange
personage, half youth and half fish. She turned to run as soon as she
saw him and did not stop until she had gained a cliff that overlooked
the sea. Here she waited for a moment and turned around to look in
wonder as Glaucus raised himself upon a rock and the sun touched his
green hair and scaly covering until he shone in its light. He called to
Scylla.
"Do not flee from me, maiden! I am no monster or even a sea-animal, but
have been transformed from a poor fisherman to a god of the sea." Then
Glaucus told Scylla the whole story of his amazing adventures and tried
to describe to her the kingdom of Neptune with its playing dolphins, the
castles of rose colored and white coral, and the never ending music of
the waters.
"Come with me, and descend to Neptune's realm," he begged, but Scylla
would not remain to even listen. She fled and left nothing to console
Glaucus but her scattered sea shells lying in bright heaps on the rocks.
Glaucus did not pursue Scylla but he felt that he could not give her up.
He remembered the strange charm of the sea that there had been in the
herbs on his native island, and he wondered if he might, by chance, find
some such power for giving the nymph, Scylla, the desire for the sea
that had drawn him to Neptune's kingdom. But Glaucus could not explore
his little fishing island, for it was a long way off and he had
forgotten its direction even. So he made what proved to be an almost
disastrous decision. He set out for the island of Circe, the
enchantress, to ask her help in winning Scylla.
Circe was, in the beginning, a daughter of the sun but she had put her
light of learning to wicked uses and had made herself into a powerful
sorceress. She lived in a palace embowered with trees and those were the
only signs of vegetation on her island. But if a shipwrecked crew came
up the shores, hoping to find a welcome and timber for building a new
bark, they were immediately surrounded by lions, tigers and wolves who
had formerly been men but had been changed by Circe's magic to the form
of beasts.
The brave hero of Greece, Ulysses, came in his travels to Circe's isle
once, and his crew heard the sounds of lovely music coming from the
castle in the trees and the tones of a maiden's sweet singing. They had
endured the raging of the sea and all its perils for many days and they
hastened to the palace where Circe, who had the appearance of a
princess, greeted them and ordered a feast for them. As they ate, she
touched them one by one with her wand and the men were all changed to
swine. They kept the thoughts of men, but they had the head, body, voice
and bristles of these despised creatures, and Circe shut them up in
sties and fed them with acorns. Ulysses persuaded the sorceress to
release his men, but he, the hero, was not able to resist her charms and
remained in her palace a year, his work and country forgotten.
Surely Glaucus was setting out on a mad errand when he decided to go to
Circe. But he persisted and landed on her island. He told her how Scylla
had looked upon him with terror, and he begged to have a charm by means
of which he might make Scylla love the sea as the herb had made him a
subject of Neptune.
"Sooner shall trees grow at the bottom of the ocean and sea weed on the
mountain peaks than I will cease to love Scylla and her alone," Glaucus
told Circe.
The enchantress looked on Glaucus and she began to admire him as much as
Scylla had been frightened by him. He was really quite a distinguished
looking personage, for he had the power to take on human form when he
wished, and his trailing robes of green seaweed looked almost kingly.
"I will brew a potion as you wish with my own hands and carry it to
Scylla," Circe told Glaucus, but she had decided to work harm on the
innocent nymph in order to keep Glaucus forever on her island.
Circe's potion was mixed of the most poisonous plants which grew on her
island. She blended them with deadly skill and then took her way to the
coast of Sicily where Scylla lived. There was a little bay on the coast
where Scylla loved to come in the middle of the day when the sun was
high to bathe in the cool waters. Circe poured her poison into the
clear blue bay and muttered incantations of mighty power over it. Then
she returned to her island.
Scylla came that day as usual when the sun was high and plunged into the
waters up to her waist. What was her horror to discover that she was
sinking to her shoulders and then to her head. The waters covered her
before anyone heard her frightened calls for help and where she had
stepped so happily into the waters which she loved, there were only a
few ripples on the surface of the bay and soon even they were gone.
Circe's charm had taken effect and the lovable Scylla had been carried
down to Neptune's kingdom, but not as Glaucus had desired, for she was
without motion or sight or speech.
Glaucus, meanwhile, forgot Scylla in the enchantment of Circe's island
and remained in the waters near there, taking human form when he wished
and enjoying the luxuries of her palace. Perhaps he might never have
remembered that he was a subject of Neptune if his attention had not
been attracted one day to the wild beasts which prowled about the
island. They were speaking to each other with the voices of men and
bewailing the fate by which they had been led there from their ships and
brought into Circe's power.
Glaucus, hearing them, understood what might be in store for him. He
began to hate the powers of the wicked enchantress and the memory came
to him of Scylla as she had appeared to him on the rock, her hands full
of bright shells. He plunged into the water and was soon a long distance
from the fatal island.
Glaucus began then to search for Scylla through the many leagues of the
ocean but he could not find her. That was because Scylla, through the
design of Circe, had gone down as mortals do and been drowned. The sea
was full of such, and as Glaucus wandered about among the gardens of sea
anemones and along the shell strewn roads of Neptune's kingdom, he felt
a new desire in his heart. He knew how those mortals felt whose loved
ones had been taken away from them by the sea, and he began using his
power to restore the drowned to life again. For a thousand years Glaucus
went up and down through the sea restoring mortals who had loved to
each other again. And in all his following of the tides he was searching
for Scylla.
After a thousand years had passed and it seemed to the gods that Glaucus
had expiated the wrong he had done in appealing to Circe, he found
Scylla in the green depths. And the nymphs say that the two lived always
happily together in a coral palace with a sea garden of anemones and
green water plants all about it.
THE WINNING OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE.
Jason was having a boat built in which he planned to set sail on a kind
of pirate expedition. He was going as far as the eastern shore of the
Black Sea to try and capture and bring home the Golden Fleece.
This golden fleece was a prize indeed, for it was a good deal like the
magic carpet in a fairy tale. In very ancient times Mercury, the god
with the winged shoes, had given the queen of Thessaly a ram whose
fleece was of pure gold. There came a time when the queen found it
necessary to send her son away from the kingdom for safety as quickly
and secretly as possible. So she sent him on the back of this ram, who
leaped into the air, crossed the strait that divides Europe and Asia,
and landed the boy without accident in Colchis in the Black Sea.
Ever since then its fleece of gold had hung in a sacred grove of Colchis
guarded by a dragon who never slept. It was said that the fleece could
carry one through the air as far as he wished to go, and its gold was
the finest and purest in the world. A great many adventurers had
equipped expeditions for getting the golden fleece, but so far none of
them had been successful. Jason had a different idea about it, however,
than any youth of Greece who had set out for the fleece before. He felt
that it was his right, in a way, because he was going to be a king if he
could bring it home.
Jason's uncle, Pelias, was the king of a part of Thessaly. Because the
golden fleece had belonged in Thessaly in the first place, Pelias had an
idea that any king in Thessaly who could get it might keep it, and enjoy
its magic powers. But Pelias did not want the trouble of going for it.
He was willing to give up his throne to the lad, Jason, if he could
bring the golden fleece home. And Jason was quite willing to be the head
of such a pirate expedition with the promise of this advantage at the
end.
Jason did not even build his ship, but paid a vast sum of money to have
it done for him. It was a stupendous task in those days to make a boat
that would weather a sea voyage. About the only boats that the Greeks
had were small ones shaped like canoes and hollowed out from the trunks
of trees. Jason had decided to take fifty of his friends with him, and
that meant the building of a larger boat than had ever been launched
before from Thessaly. A gigantic tree had to be cut down and gouged and
shaped by hand. New looms had to be set working to weave wide enough
cloth for the sails. For months the sound of axes and chisels echoed
along the beach, until at last this great boat, the Argo, was finished
and launched, and Jason brought his friends, whom he called the
Argonauts, to board her.
Jason chose his crew well. They were all fine, well born youths of
Greece, and everyone of them made a name for himself later on. Hercules
was of the Argonauts, and there has never been any such strength as his.
There was Theseus, who could move rocks and capture robbers
single-handed. There was also Orpheus, the son of Apollo, who could
tame, wild beasts with the beautiful music of his lyre. Nestor, who grew
up to be a famous warrior of Greece, went with them. They seated
themselves with their leader, Jason, in the ship, a whistling breeze
filled her sails, and they shot swiftly before the wind toward Colchis.