Page 35 his preceptress: in a word (that I waste not your time further) all the wickedness that is ours in common is his alone. Him will I introduce, if the plan commend itself to you, to the kingly palace of the emperor of the world. Be he wiser than Numa, be he Minos’ self, needs must he yield and succumb to the treachery of my foster child.” A shout followed her words: all stretched forth their impious hands and applauded the awful plot. When Megaera had gathered together her dress with the black serpent that girdled her, and bound her hair with combs of steel, she approached the sounding stream of Phlegethon, and seizing a tall pine-tree from the scorched summit of the flaming bank kindled it in the pitchy flood, then plied her swift wings o’er sluggish Tartarus. There is a place where Gaul stretches her furthermost shore spread out before the waves of Ocean: ’tis there that Ulysses is said to have called up the silent ghosts with a libation of blood. There is heard the mournful weeping of the spirits of the dead as they flit by with faint sound of wings, and the inhabitants see the pale ghosts pass and the shades of the dead. ’Twas from here the goddess leapt forth, dimmed the sun’s fair beams and clave the sky with horrid howlings. Britain felt the deadly sound, the noise shook the country of the Senones,[50] Tethys stayed her tide, and Rhine let fall his urn and shrank his stream. Thereupon, in the guise of an old man, her serpent locks changed at her desire to snowy hair, her dread cheeks furrowed with many a wrinkle and feigning weariness in her gait she enters the walls of Elusa,[51] in search of the house she had long known so well. Long [50] Their territory lay some sixty miles S.E. of Paris. Its chief town was Agedincum (mod. Sens). [51] Elusa (the modern Eauze in the Department of Gers) was the birthplace of Rufinus (_cf._ Zosim. iv. 51. 1). * * * * * Page 36 tecta petens, oculisque diu liventibus haesit peiorem mirata virum, tum talia fatur: