You remember that Cadmus founded Thebes. One of his daughters was named Ino. She married a son of King Æolus, who had been married before, and had two children, Phryxus and Helle. Ino was a cruel stepmother, and deceived her husband into thinking that the oracle at Delphi required him to sacrifice his son to Jupiter; but as the poor boy stood before the altar, down from the skies came a ram with a golden fleece, which took both the children on his back, and flew away with them over land and sea; but poor Helle let go in passing the narrow strait between Asia and Europe, fell into the sea, and was drowned. The strait was called after her, the Hellespont, or Helle’s Sea. Phryxus came safely to Colchis, on the Black Sea, and was kindly received by Æetes, the king of the country. They sacrificed the golden-woolled ram to Jupiter, and nailed up its fleece to a tree in the grove of Mars. Some time after, Pelias, the usurping king of Iolcus, was driving a mule-car through the market-place, when he saw a fine young man, with hair flowing on his shoulders, two spears in his hand, and only one sandal. He was very much afraid, for it had been foretold to him by an oracle that he would be slain by the man with one foot bare. And this youth was really Jason, the son of his brother Æson, from whom he had taken the kingdom. Fearing that he would kill the child, Æson had sent it away to the cave of the Centaur Chiron, by whom Jason had been bred up, and had now come to seek his fortune. He had lost his shoe in the mud, while kindly carrying an old woman across a river, little knowing that she was really the goddess Juno, who had come down in that form to make trial of the kindness of men, and who was thus made his friend for ever. Pelias sent for the young stranger the next day, and asked him what he would do if he knew who was the man fated to kill him. “I should send him to fetch the Golden Fleece,” said Jason. “Then go and fetch it,” said Pelias. Jason thereupon began building a ship, which he called Argo, and proclaimed the intended expedition throughout Greece, thus gathering together all the most famous heroes then living, most of whom had, like him, been brought up by the great Centaur Chiron. Hercules was one of them, and another was Theseus, the great hero of the Ionian city of Athens, whose prowess was almost equal to that of Hercules. He had caught and killed the great white bull which Hercules had brought from Crete and let loose, and he had also destroyed the horrid robber Procrustes (the Stretcher), who had kept two iron bedsteads, one long and one short. He put tall men into the short bed, and cut them down to fit it, and short men into the long bed, pulling them out till they died, until Theseus finished his life on one of his own beds. [Picture: Building the Argo]