with the last above all, whose ‘insatiate ardour’ of speed saved Adrastus from Theban pursuit, and brought him in the original mythical winner in the Nemæan games; whose sympathy, moreover, with human miseries broke down, as in their own case, the barriers of nature, and accomplished the portent of speech and tears. Their quasi-immortality is shared by Bayard, heard to neigh, it is said, every Mid-summer-night, along the leafy aisles of the Forest of Ardennes;[123] and by Sharats, who still crops the moss of the cavern where sleeps his long-accustomed rider, Marko, waiting, like other hibernating heroes, for the dawn of better days. Footnote 122: Quintus Smyrnæus, iii. 743. Footnote 123: Grimm and Stallybrass, _Teutonic Mythology_, p. 666. Prophetic horses of the Xanthus type have been heard of in many lands. They are a commonplace of Esthonian folk-lore; Dulcefal, the charger of Hreggvid, king of Gardariki in Old Russia, could infallibly forecast the issue of a campaign; the coursers of the Indian Râvana had a just presentiment of his fate;[124] and Cæsar’s indomitable horse was reported—credibly or otherwise—to have wept during three days before the stroke of Brutus fell. Even the remains of the dead animals were of high importance in Teutonic divination. Their flesh was pre-eminently witches’ food; horses’ hoofs made witches’ drinking-cups; the pipers at witches’ revels played on horses’ heads, which were besides an indispensable adjunct to many diabolical ceremonies.[125] Footnote 124: Gubernatis, _Zoological Mythology_, vol. i. p. 349. Homer describes the Trojans as flinging live horses into the Scamander;[126] and the Persians in the time of Herodotus occasionally resorted to the same barbarous means of propitiating rivers. In honour of the sun—perhaps the legitimate claimant to such honours—horses were immolated on the summit of Taygetus, and a team of four, with chariot attached, was yearly sunk by the Rhodians into the sea. The Argives worshipped Poseidon with similar rites,[127] certainly not learned from the Phœnicians, to whom they were unknown. They were unknown as well to the Homeric Greeks; for the slaughter on the funeral-pyre of Patroclus belonged to a different order of ideas. Here the prompting motive was that ingrained desire to supply the needs, moral and physical, of the dead, which led to so many blood-stained obsequies. Horses and dogs fell, in an especial manner, victims to its prevalence; and have consequently a prominent place on early Greek tomb-reliefs representing the future state.[128] Footnote 125: Grimm and Stallybrass, _op. cit._ pp. 47, 659, 1050. Footnote 126: _Iliad_, xxi. 132. Footnote 127: Pausanias, lib. iii. cap. 20, viii. 7. Footnote 128: Gardner, _Journal of Hellenic Studies_, vol. v. p. 130.