Riddle-making is not left alone by the purveyors of nursery yarns, though belonging to the mythologic state of thought. The Hindu calls the sun seven-horsed; so the German riddle asks-- "What is the chariot drawn by?" "Seven white and seven black horses." The Greek riddle of the two sisters--Day and Night. Another one given by _Diog. Lært._ i. 91, _Athenagoras_ x. 451, runs-- "One is father, twelve the children, and born to each other Maidens thirty, whose twain form is parted asunder, White to behold on the one side, black to behold on the other, All immortal in being, all doomed to dwindle and perish."[H] "The year, months, and days." * * * * * An interesting English rhyme says-- "Old mother needle had but one eye, A very long tail which she let fly, Every time she went through a gap She left a bit of her tail in the trap." "Needle and sewing cotton." * * * * * "Purple, yellow, red, and green, The king cannot reach, nor yet the queen, Nor can Old Noll, whose power's so great, Tell me this riddle while I count eight." "A rainbow." This nursery rhyme's date is fixed by the reference to Old Noll, the Lord Protector. * * * * * "As round as an apple, as deep as a cup, And all the king's horses can't pull it up." "A well." * * * * * "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty Dumpty had a great fall; Three score men, and three score more, Cannot make Humpty Dumpty as before again." "An egg." Or-- "And all the king's horses, and all the king's men, Couldn't put Humpty together again." Plutarch says of Homer that he died of chagrin, being unable to solve a riddle. The Phœnix myth, once believed in by the Egyptian priests, is now, and had even so long ago as in Herodotus' time, degenerated into a mere child-story of a bird, who lived, and died, and rose again from its own ashes. As a relic of a mysterious faith, this fabulous bird has come down to us with diminished glory each century. Old Herodotus, the father of history, tells us that he saw it once--not the bird itself, but a painting of it--at Heliopolis, the City of the Sun, in Egypt. Even this old Greek historian could not quite believe the current story in his day concerning this bird; that it was supposed to revisit the earth after a five-hundred-year sojourn in the land of gods was to him, at least, a little strange. Pliny, the Roman, likewise gives a description of it. "I have been told," he writes, "it was as big as an eagle, yellow in colour, glittering as gold about the neck, with a body-plumage of deep red-purple. Its tail is sky-blue, with some of the pennæ of a light rose colour. The head is adorned with a crest and pinnacle beautiful to the sight."