And so long as he was young and strong, and could get up early in the morning to look at the color of Aurora's wings, that was all very well. It did just as well as if he were to die in time, like other men. But it happened at last that, while Aurora remained as young as ever, Tithonus began to get old. The promise of endless life did not prevent him from growing bald, and toothless, and liable to catch cold if he went out into the keen morning air. By the time that he was a hundred years old, he became tired of getting up to see the sun rise day after day. At two hundred he felt like a bundle of aches and pains, and he liked a doze in the sun better than a thousand Auroras. At three hundred he became tired of living, and wanted to be able to creep into some quiet corner of Hades, drink a cup of Lethe, and go to sleep and think of nothing. But he could not; for though racked with pain and weary of life, he could not die! He could only shrink and shrivel till, after many hundreds of years, he was less than two inches long. His skin turned dry and brown. His voice became cracked, and thin, and shrill. He lost his senses, and kept on chirping the same thing over and over again. He never stirred from the warmth of the chimney-corner, night or day. His legs grew as thin as threads of cotton. He dwindled into a dry, wooden-like insect. In short, a _Cricket_. And such he remains to this day. But Aurora is as young and as beautiful and as fresh as ever, and has clean forgotten him; while he spends his life in trying to be merry, and in chirping:-- "Oh, how I want to die!" THE ADVENTURES OF PERSEUS. Once upon a time there was a king of Argos named Acrisius, to whom it had been foretold that he would be slain by his daughter's son. This troubled him greatly. So he built a high tower of brass, and imprisoned his daughter Danaë in the very highest room. Having furnished her with provisions and amusements to last her all her life, he closed up all the entrances, so that nobody could get into the tower, and set guards all round it, so that nobody could even come near it. He did all this so that she should never marry and have a son who would grow up to kill him. You may imagine what sort of a life Danae led, shut up in the brazen tower. She was made comfortable enough, and had plenty to eat and drink, and musical instruments, and pictures, and jewels, and all such things; but she never, from year's end to year's end, saw a face, except when she looked into the looking-glass, nor heard a voice but when she sang to herself--which she soon got tired of doing. She could not even look out of the window, because there were no windows to look from. She lived by lamplight, and she knew that this was to be her life for all the rest of her days.