At last it grew dark, and torches began to blaze in front of the booths. “Shall we go home, Charmides?” said Glaucon. “Oh, no!” cried the boy. “I haven’t seen it all. I am not tired. It is gayer now than ever with the torches. See all those shining flames.” And he ran to a booth where a hundred little bronze lamps hung, each with its tongue of clear light. It was an imagemaker’s booth. The table stood full of little clay statues of the gods. Charmides took up one. It was a young man leaning against a tree trunk. On his arm he held a baby. “It is a model of the great marble Hermes in the temple of Hera, my little master,” said the image maker. “Great Praxiteles made that one, poor Philo made this one.” “It is beautiful,” said Charmides and turned away, holding it tenderly in his hand. Glaucon waited a moment to pay for the figure. Then he followed Charmides who had walked on. He was standing on the bridge gazing at the water. “Glaucon,” he said, “I must see that statue of Hermes.” They stood there talking about the wonderful works of Praxiteles and of many another artist. Glaucon pointed to a little wooden shed lying in the meadow. “That,” he said, “is the workshop of Phidias. There he made the gold and ivory statue of Zeus that you shall see in Zeus’s temple. That workshop will stay there many a year, I think, for people to love because so great a thing was done there.” “Is it so wonderful?” asked Charmides. “When it was finished,” Glaucon answered solemnly, “Phidias stood before it and prayed to Zeus to tell him whether it pleased the god. Great Zeus heard the prayer, and in his joy at the beautiful thing he hurled a blazing thunderbolt and smote the floor before the statue as if to say, ‘This image is Zeus himself.’ But I have never seen it, for a slave may not pass the sacred wall.” Now the full moon had risen, and the world was swimming in silver light. The statue of Victory hung over the sacred place on spread wings. Many another great form on its high pillar seemed standing in the deep sky above the world. The little pool in the pebbly river had stars in the bottom. “This Kladeos is a savage little river in the spring,” said Glaucon. “It tries to tear away our Olympia or drown it or cover it with sand. You see, men have had to fence it in with stone walls.” But Charmides was looking at the sacred place and its soft shining statues in the sky. “Let us walk around the wall,” he said.