Description and narration are as vivid as these little similes. We are made to see Daphnis at his bath: his hair black and thick, his body sun-burned dark as though colored by the shadow of his hair;[279] the coming of spring with flowers covering the valleys and the mountains, bees humming, birds warbling, lambs gamboling; the vintage scene with the peasants all busy in the vineyard with the wine-presses, the hogsheads, the baskets, and the grapes;[280] the winter landscape with the deep snow, the rushing torrents, the ice, the laden trees;[281] the country wedding with the feast on beds of green boughs before the cave of the Nymphs, the songs of the reapers and the vintners, the dancing to the pipes, the goats sharing the feast, the bridal procession with its piping and singing.[282] Longus’ art of narration is employed as skillfully as are his descriptions. This art appears not only in the pattern of the whole romance, but in the skillful use of stories within the story to diversify and enliven the longer narrative. After the feast of Dionysus, the old men, their tongues loosed with wine, fell into reminiscence and told tales to each other: “how bravely in their youth they had administered the pasturing of their flocks and herds, how in their time they had escaped very many invasions and inroads of pirates and thieves. Here one bragged that he had killed a wolf, here another that he had bin second to Pan alone in the skill and art of piping.”[283] That last was Philetas, the wise old shepherd who told Daphnis and Chloe the story of the gay little Eros whom he had found playing in his garden flying like a nightingale from bough to bough of the myrtles, a lovely story with a point for Philetas’ _ars amatoria_.[284] The other inset stories are mostly short myths. So Daphnis tells Chloe how the mourning dove was once a maid, very proud of her singing and by her song alone she kept the cows she tended near her in the wood. But a shepherd lad rivalled her music and piped off eight of her finest cows to his own herd. And the girl in despair prayed to become a bird. The gods consented and left her that sweet voice so still she calls the cattle home.[285] At the feast of Dionysus Lamo tells a myth which a Sicilian goatherd had sung to him, a tiny tale of how the girl Syrinx fleeing Pan’s embraces was changed into a reed and then made by Pan into his pipe, with reeds of unequal lengths to symbolize their ill-matched love.[286] All these stories are very short and simple, bits of folk-lore such as peasants might relate at their feasts or in the open.