The mourning Dryads, stricken by their loss, don black robes and pray to Ceres for the punishment of Erisichthon. The goddess nods assent; she shakes the fields heavy with crops, and contrives for him a punishment which would be pitiable had he not forfeited pity by his deeds, dooming him to be destroyed by pestilential hunger. But since this may not be attempted by the goddess herself, for the fates will not that Ceres and famine should co-exist, she charges one of the mountain nymphs to summon Famine from the cold and bleak shores of Scythia, that barren land where there is neither corn nor tree—the abode of dull frost, pallor, shivering and hunger. Thus does the goddess punish the impious sinner, and so she tortures him until he is driven to gnaw at his own limbs. (Ovid, Met. 740.) Ovid’s description of hunger as a distinct being called to wreak vengeance is as gruesome as anything that I know of in poetry. The idea that trees are inhabited by supernatural beings, spirits or lesser gods, is common enough in the folk-lore of all countries, and that is what has given rise to the fables of trees which bleed and utter cries if they are cruelly treated. In Japan there are endless pretty and fanciful stories, in which the spirits of beautiful trees—often their matchless cherry trees—fall in love with and bewitch the sons or daughters of men. Nothing is prettier in that country, so rich in beauty, than the Shinto shrines nestling in choice spots among the forest-clad mountains. Around each temple are planted trees which are sacred to, and under the special protection of, the tutelary deity of the place. And in connection with them there is a custom called “Ushi no Toki Mairi” (“Going to worship at the hour of the ox”).[10] It is practised by jealous women who wish to be revenged on their faithless lovers or husbands, and reminds us of those waxen dolls with which the witches and adepts in black magic of the Middle Ages, and in ancient Greece, according to Theocritus, were wont to pretend that they could rid their patron of their enemies. When the world is at rest, at two in the morning, the hour of which the ox is the symbol, the woman rises; she dons a white robe and high sandals or clogs; her coif is a metal tripod in which are thrust three lighted candles; round her neck she hangs a mirror, which falls upon her bosom; in her left hand she carries a small straw figure, the effigy of the lover who has deserted her, and in her right she grasps a hammer and nails, with which she fastens the figure to one of the sacred trees which surround the shrine. There she prays for the death of the traitor, vowing that if her petition be heard she will herself pull out the nails which now offend the god by wounding the mystic tree. Night after night she comes to the shrine, and each night she drives in two or more nails, believing that every nail will shorten her lover’s life, for the god, to save his beloved tree, will surely strike him dead.[11]