Here the mythology of their ancestors is deeply ingrained in the inhabitants, both in the ritual of their Church, and in their manners and customs; the ritual, indeed, of the Eastern Church is but an intellectual adaptation under Christian guidance of the problems propounded by the later philosophers to the popular doctrines of polytheism. I was in the island of Keos, or Zia, one of the Cyclades, when the idea of forming this collection struck me, and it was on the occasion of being told that here St. Artemidos is considered as the patron saint of weakly children. The church dedicated to this saint is some little way from the town on the hill slopes; thither a mother will take a child afflicted by any mysterious wasting, “struck by the Nereids,” as they say; she then strips off its clothes, and puts on new ones blessed by the priest, leaving the old ones as a perquisite for the church; and then if perchance the child grows strong, she will thank St. Artemidos for the blessing vouchsafed, unconscious that she is perpetuating the archaic worship of Artemis. The Ionian idea of the fructifying and nourishing properties of the Ephesian Artemis has been transferred to her Christian namesake. About these Nereids, too, we hear much in modern Greece, and they have the properties of many of our mythological friends, those of Keos, for example, are supposed to live on cliffs and in trees; if a man sleeps under the shadow of a cliff or tree, and is taken with a cold sweat, they say “the goddess of the tree has injured him,” and accordingly to appease her they spread on the place a clean white cloth, and put on it new-made bread, a plate with honey, another with sweetmeats, a bottle of good wine, a knife and fork and an empty glass, an unburnt candle, and an incense pot; an old woman utters some mystic words, and then all go away, “that the Nereids may eat and the sufferer regain his health.” We have here a ceremony very like that anciently performed at Athens to appease the Eumenides when a banquet was laid near the caves they were supposed to haunt, of which honey and milk were the necessary ingredients. The Nereids in many cases correspond to the nymphs of antiquity; they preside over healing streams, and they wash in them at night when the waters sleep, and no one at that time dares to approach for fear of becoming frenzied (νυμφόληπτος).