After that, Midas lived in the country and dressed as plainly as the poorest peasant. He was so thankful to be free from his terrible gift that he never wanted anyone to remind him of the time when everything he touched turned to gold. But even in the country, the yellow plums, pears, and apples reminded Midas of the fruit he had touched in his own garden. In autumn, when golden leaves are falling everywhere and the grain is waving in the field, one may fancy King Midas is in our own land. OLD GRASSHOPPER GRAY _Greek_ "O, grasshopper, grasshopper gray, Give me molasses and then hop away." That is what Bessie Allen said to the little creature she held between her thumb and fingers. Did you ever say that rhyme? I should not wonder if you had said it an hundred times. The grasshopper in Bessie's fingers seemed very ready to give her brown molasses from his little mouth and then she let him hop away while she went to catch another. She did not want that molasses; all she wanted was the fun of catching the little "hoppity-hops," as she sometimes called them. "Come, catch me! I'm a hopper," called her five-year-old brother Willie. And she saw the little fellow hopping through the grass. Bessie had so much fun trying to catch this new "grasshopper gray," that she forgot all about the little creatures she had been pinching. At last she had her arms around her brother Willie. "Now you are caught," she said. "Give me some molasses." And then they both laughed so hard that their mother heard as she came to the door to look for them. That night their mother said to their father: "I have a new name for Willie." "What is it?" asked their father. "Tithonus," said their mother. [Illustration: AURORA, THE GODDESS OF THE DAWN. From a painting on an old vase.] "When I was in school one of my lessons was about the beautiful goddess Aurora. She was said to open the rosy gates of dawn with her own fingers, so that the wonderful horses of Apollo might pass through to follow their shining track through the sky. She was so beautiful that Tithonus, who lived on the earth, always watched for the sunrise, that he might see Aurora. After a while she began to watch for him, too. She looked down every morning on the wakening world and found that he was almost the only one among mortals who enjoyed the glorious colors Apollo painted in the sky with his arrows of light. One morning she dared to sing to him, and then he answered that it was Aurora, and not Apollo, for whom he was watching each morning at sunrise. She loved him for this and became his wife.