When he had made this lovely instrument, he tried the chords, and brought forth beautiful music. He hit the strings with a little instrument called the plectrum, and lo! up from beneath his hand there went a tumult sweet of mighty sounds and from his lips he sent a strain of unpremeditated wit, joyous and wild and wanton—such as you may hear among revellers on a holiday. He sang a lovely song in honor of his mother Maia, but while he was singing, he was suddenly seized with a new fancy. So he deposited in his sacred crib the hollow lyre, and from the sweet cavern rushed with great leaps up to the mountain’s head, revolving in his mind some subtle feat of thievish craft, such as a swindler might devise in the lone season of dim night. The great Sun had driven his steeds and chariot under the ocean’s bed. Meanwhile the child strode over the Pierian mountains clothed in shadows, where the immortal oxen of the God are pastured in the flowering unmown meadows, and safely stalled in a remote abode—elate and proud he drove fifty from the herd, lowing aloud. He drove them wandering over the sandy way, but being of a crafty disposition, he drove them backward and forward astray, so that the tracks which seemed before were aft; then he threw his sandals into the ocean spray, and for each foot he wrought a kind of raft of tamarisk, and tamarisk-like sprigs, and bound them in a lump with withy twigs. And on his feet he tied these sandals light, so that the trail of the wide leaves might confuse his tracks; and then, a self-sufficing wight, like a man hastening on some distant way, he from Piera’s mountain bent his flight; but an old man perceived the infant pass down green Onchestus heaped like beds with grass. The old man stood, dressing his sunny vine: “Halloo! old fellow with the crooked shoulder! You grub those stumps? Before they will bear wine methinks even you must grow a little older: attend, I pray, to this advice of mine if you would escape something which might appall a bolder man. Seeing, see not—and hearing, hear not—and—if you have understanding—understand.” So saying, Hermes roused the oxen vast; over shadowy mountain and resounding dell, and flower-paven plains, great Hermes passed; till the black night divine, which favoring fell around his steps, grew gray, and morning fast wakened the world to work, and from her sea-strewn cell, the sublime Morn had just begun to climb into her watch-tower. Now to Alpheus he drove all the broad foreheaded oxen of the Sun. They came unwearied to the lofty stall and to the water-troughs which ever run through the fresh fields—and when everyone had been pastured with rush-grass tall, lotus and all sweet herbage, the great God drove them into the stall.