"But how, then, shall I cross the wet grey fields of this watery way?" asked Perseus. "Would that I were a white-winged bird that skims across the waves." And, with the smile of a loving comrade, Hermes laid his hand on the shoulder of Perseus. "My winged shoes shall be thine," he said, "and the white-winged sea-birds shalt thou leave far, far behind." "Yet another gift is thine," said Athené. "Gird on, as gift from the gods, this sword that is immortal." For a moment Perseus lingered. "May I not bid farewell to my mother?" he asked. "May I not offer burnt-offerings to thee and to Hermes, and to my father Zeus himself?" But Athené said Nay, at his mother's weeping his heart might relent, and the offering that the Olympians desired was the head of Medusa. Then, like a fearless young golden eagle, Perseus spread out his arms, and the winged shoes carried him across the seas to the cold northern lands whither Athené had directed him. Each day his shoes took him a seven days' journey, and ever the air through which he passed grew more chill, till at length he reached the land of everlasting snow, where the black ice never knows the conquering warmth of spring, and where the white surf of the moaning waves freezes solid even as it touches the shore. It was a dark grim place to which he came, and in a gloomy cavern by the sea lived the Graeæ, the three grey sisters that Athené had told him he must seek. Old and grey and horrible they were, with but one tooth amongst them, and but one eye. From hand to hand they passed the eye, and muttered and shivered in the blackness and the cold. [Illustration: THEY WHIMPERED AND BEGGED OF HIM] Boldly Perseus spoke to them and asked them to guide him to the place where Medusa and her sisters the Gorgons dwelt. "No others know where they dwell," he said. "Tell me, I pray thee, the way that I may find them." But the Grey Women were kin to the Gorgons, and hated all the children of men, and ugly was their evil mirth as they mocked at Perseus and refused to tell him where Medusa might be found. But Perseus grew wily in his desire not to fail, and as the eye passed from one withered, clutching hand to another, he held out his own strong young palm, and in her blindness one of the three placed the eye within it. Then the Grey Women gave a piteous cry, fierce and angry as the cry of old grey wolves that have been robbed of their prey, and gnashed upon him with their toothless jaws. And Perseus said: "Wicked ye are and cruel at heart, and blind shall ye remain forever unless ye tell me where I may find the Gorgons. But tell me that, and I give back the eye." Then they whimpered and begged of him, and when they found that all their beseeching was in vain, at length they told him.